Tag Archives: e-texts

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eBooks in Higher Education, especially in Libraries

  November 12, 2014 ,

The history of the codex includes myriad and often convoluted ways of producing and distributing the book to readers.  Current day production and distribution of eBooks is no different in its dizzying variety.  To narrow things down, here I will present a snippet of the information available on how eBooks get to readers within the higher education system.  In particular, I want to mention some ways in which university libraries acquire and distribute eBooks. First of all, universities and colleges are increasing acquiring more eBooks than print books; among all U.S. academic libraries, as of 2012, more than half of their added materials were eBooks.  This is especially true for community colleges, which makes sense given it would be more convenient for their commuter student population to access materials remotely.  But, for all libraries, eBooks make sense; physical books take up a lot of space, which translates into the need for more real estate.  A perpetual problem for libraries continues to be the need for space for their collections. See the table below from the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Almanac of Higher Education, 2014,” extracted from U.S. Department of Education figures, FY 2012 (http://chronicle.com.ezproxy.gsu.edu/article/Percentage-of-E-Books-at/147835/). Table of Percentage of E-Books at Academic Libraries, by Institution Type, FY 2012 click chart to enlarge University or college libraries depend on a variety of means to provide eBooks to users and there are several different kinds of middle-people distributors who provide content to be consumed by readers via different methods.  First, and perhaps most … Continue reading

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eTextbooks

  November 5, 2014 ,

I recently read a 2014 article about eTextbooks; the focus of the narrative study, published in College Teaching and written by Jenny Bossaller and Jenna Kammer, both at the University of Missouri, centered on faculty experience with eTextbooks, particularly those developed by college textbook publishers, and the advantages and disadvantages of this approach and arrangement. Bossaller and Kammer’s purpose in the article was “to inform instructors and administrators of the positive aspects (such as convenience, portability, and currency) and negative aspects (such as privacy, cost, and outsourcing) of teaching with etexts” (69).  Their methodology included a literature review about etext use in higher education and narrative interviews with eight faculty who had used etexts produced in conjunction with vendors (and in some cases, faculty who had also produced their own eTextbook). The authors list from another study (Cheverie, Peterson, and Cummings, 2012), “six major policy areas for etexts in higher education: affordability, broadband (network connectivity), information policy (encompassing access versus ownership, Digital Rights Management [DRM], and preservation), accessibility, privacy and security, and identity management (capable of single sign-on)”, but focus in their paper on affordability, privacy, and access, and add to this list outsourcing etext production, which they define as an important policy decision made by the faculty and university (69). The information in the study surprised me in several ways: 1.  I had not read much about nor thought much about the policy implications of the fact that college textbook companies have expanded their roles these days and are … Continue reading

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Making E-reading more Productive in the Classroom

  September 3, 2014

One of the major projects that I will be working on this fall is a project coming out of the history department’s efforts to re-imagine the US history survey (2110). This is perhaps the key course offering of the entire history department. Certainly, it is the primary, and in many cases only, exposure that GSU students will have to history as an academic discipline. Two faculty members in the department, Rob Baker & Jeff Youngs, have been working for over a year on their version of the course, which will be a hybrid class featuring a custom-built and custom-written multimedia textbook. The course is being offered this fall for the first time as a hybrid course, meaning that students meeting physically only 1 time per week, using the other course period to engage with video segments, online activities (such as quizzes), and the traditional staple of 2110, reading assignments from a textbook coupled with a hefty dose of primary documents. As a SIF fellow, I’ll be helping primarily with editing ‘raw’ video segments, most of which take the form of conversations or debates between historians about important historical topics, adding visuals to the footage to make a more engaging viewing experience. Today, though, I want to talk a little bit out the readings for Rob & Jeff’s version of 2110. Both the primary sources and the textbook itself exist as PDF files, which students access and read through D2l (Desire-to-Learn, GSU’s commercial class portal pages). Having all the readings available … Continue reading