Posted on 02/18/2020 12:31:26 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Pearson, the world's largest textbook publisher, announced that it is moving from a traditional to a "digital first" publishing model. This development upends several traditions that are more than a century old. It will bring about a digital transformation in textbook publishing that has been in the works for a long time and will fundamentally change the way college students get their educational materials.
The traditional model for publishing textbooks has been simple: An author, typically a full-time college professor, writes a textbook under contract with a publisher. The publisher puts out a print edition, gets course instructors to adopt it and sells it in college bookstores. If the textbook is popular, the professor will write an updated edition under a new contract every few years. A highly popular textbook will last through many editions; Paul Samuelson's Economics, for example, dates back to 1948 and is now in its 19th edition.
This model has serious limitations, which the digital age has thrown into sharp relief, making it increasingly untenable. First and foremost is the problem of used textbooks. Students generally don't need to hang on to their textbooks for more than a semester or two. It's perfectly legal to resell your textbooks and to buy used ones, so students do it all the time, and of course, publishers make nothing from resales. So a main reason that publishers push authors to write new editions of textbooks is to give course instructors reasons to adopt them; still, writing, producing, printing and distributing new textbook just because some small amount of material (or the formatting or cosmetics) has changed is quite inefficient.
Second, it's much easier nowadays for course instructors to find materials other than textbooks to assign to their students. Free web content, magazine articles, open educational resources and trade books
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Glad to hear you say that about textbooks.
Our high schools have destroyed learning by dumbing down expectations for textbook learning. Yet, they are dependent on textbooks becuase the publishers create the overall curriculum and, especially, assessments — based on the textbooks, which teachers don’t use and students aren’t taught how to use.
Meanwhile, kids learn how not to learn independently and schools just reinforce it by deprecating homework grades, pushing “video learning” and online textbooks and running inanities such as “inverted classrooms.”
When I first became a high school teacher, I was appalled at the utter inability of my students to use a textbook. I bailed on the curriculum and spent a month teaching them to use the textbook. Suddenly, they showed up in class with prior knowledge that we could build upon rather than wasting classroom time building. And other teachers came up to me thanking me for getting their own students to start using their textbooks.
I left teaching to run an academic support service in part to save homework by teaching kids to learn to learn independently.
Pearson has over the last decade bought up the print textbook industry and is now cornering the digital market.
Regardless, it needs to justify the move to digital, while at the same time diverting competition. Think Facebook’s purchase of Instagram or WhatsApp at ridiculous prices when there is little return inherent in those businesses — these were defensive buys.
There can be effective digital learning but it’s up to the student to make it work, schools and systems will not be able to deliver the learning. That’s what scares me the most, because our schools are awful at leveraging resources (so much waste) and all they do to resolve the problems created before is add more solutions that merely create new problems.
In my mind, Adaptive Learning Technology is a gimmick that can work with some but hardly all students. All learning is student-centered, therefore it’s entirely dependent upon the student to make it work, especially since our schools are lost.
btw, all “adaptive learning” is is content, lessons and assessments that orient around assessment results. If Online courses are generally redundant, rote, and easily gamed.
Comprehension when reading digital texts is 10% less than with a printed text. Worse, estimates of comprehension are 10% better. That means that people think they’re learning more when they’re learning 20% less.
Another stunning leap into further down into the educational abyss.
(Did my master’s thesis on digital vs. print comprehension. It’s scarier than you dare think.)
dude, send me your thesis!!!
Or better, post it here for others to see.
Interesting thesis you did there.
Can you tell us why comprehensions when teading digital text are 10% less than when reading THE SAME content in printed form?
What factors cause this decrease in comprehension?
Another thing I've done for technical books is to buy the Indian version. Softcover and really thin paper, but you can get a $200 textbook for $10 or $20. They have warnings on the cover like "If read outside of South Asia you will go blind and your genitals will fall off". Well, not that extreme, but they do warn that they are only authorized for sale in South Asia.
And you competed with Indian and Communist Chinese Engineering students that use photocopied or downloaded textbooks.
That’s because the ones that write Microsoft materials are low-quality copy-paste engineers from crapholes like India or Communist China. I seen their crap work personally. They write much worse than they speak.
Revert should only be used in a git repo. Not the way Indians use it.
Pearson should be banned from doing business in this country. They bribed obama and Jeb Bush.
Was Pearson involved with the Department of Education and the Common Core curriculum?
I’m in the crowd that hates digital material. Two things that NEVER plague a proper book is battery life and media reader obsolescence. Factor in a good old EMP burst, and books would be the cornerstone of continuance of civilization.
” … but if the homework doesn’t line up with the assignment, that’s the difficult part.”
I thought of that after I posted. College was a long time ago for me. :)
I believe it has to do with brain processing. For example, why is typing 30% less efficient than hand writing for comprehension? We are physical beings, and we respond more completely to physical stimulus. I doubt we’ll ever know why since the computer industry has done a phenomenal job of ensuring people can’t find out the answers.
I also believe that the touch, look, even smell of books improves comprehension. Reading is more sensory than we’re aware of.
“Why” wasn’t researched - it was hard enough to get straight data. I believe it relates to the difference between live and recorded music, meeting someone vs seeing a photograph. There are more physical senses involved with print even though we don’t realize it, and many more visual cues. Brains also process light differently from reflected light from a page. The educrats and computer industry are working hard to make sure nobody asks about this, and if they do, to snow it under.
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