Temple U. Project Ditches Textbooks for Homemade Digital Alternatives – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
Temple University gave 11 faculty members $1,000 each to create a digital alternative to a traditional textbook. The goal of this pilot project was to demonstrate the learning benefits of working with primary sources and other relevant materials and to also help students save money on textbooks.
Kristina M. Baumli, a lecturer in Temple’s English department offered the following summary of the project’s pedagogical benefits:
By requiring students to grapple with primary sources and find their own journal articles, she said, she could teach in a way that emphasized process rather than memorization of facts in a book.
Read the full Wired Campus article…
Read the Temple U blog post about the pilot project…
I am not surprised that students will default to purchasing a text. Prior to coming to University they have had 12 years of conditioning in K-12 where this is just what you do in class. The article Resistance to the ‘Inverted Classroom’ Teaching Style confirms that even though an learning approach can yeild much better results students will go with what they know
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/02/06/resistance-to-the-inverted-classroom-can-show-up-anywhere/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
I can attest to this from my personal experience. This especially the case with students how are concerned about grades. They have spent 12 years or more in the system and know how it works and when we move away from text books and lectures they can be unsettled because it may appear to them that we are changing the rules. They are concerned about learning more they just want to make sure they get a good grade.
I think this article unfortunately mixes to issues:
1) Traditional textbooks are a one-size fits all, while instructor created texts can be made to fit the course and the instructor’s teaching style better, thereby improving teaching.
2) Printed versus digital versions of a text.
I have no issue with #1. But with respect to #2, in one of my classes students can choose between two versions of an otherwise identical text: a printed version they need to pay money for or a electronic version (formatted for typical screen devices) that they can download for free. Virtually all students seem to have chosen to buy the printed version.