Teacher-Written Digital Textbooks: A Cheaper Alternative?

K-12 schools, students and colleges are increasingly experiencing significant savings by adopting digital textbooks.

Tired of constantly replacing their outdated — and expensive — statistics textbooks, officials in the Anoka Hennepin School District have let their teachers write their own digital textbooks instead, writes Abigail Wood at the Heartlander.

“The teachers thought we could do a better job writing our own book that ﬁt our state standards and the needs of our students,” said high school math teacher Michael Engelhaupt, who helped write the digital textbook.

Three teachers were asked to create the book and were paid $10,000 each. The whole project saved a total of about $175,000.

“I think the biggest impact [comes with] giving students a book that exactly covers what they need to know,” Engelhaupt said.

“Also, the potential for saving school districts tons of money is unbelievable.”

Engelhaupt believes that the fact they’re easier to update makes them more adaptable and gives the teachers more of a sense of ownership.

However, Nicole Allen, textbook advocate for Student Public Interest Research Groups, doesn’t believe that the transition from print to digital is happening as fast as it could, despite the advantages.

Digital textbooks are becoming more reﬁned, incorporating better note-taking, application, and interactive tools, yet 75 percent of students, according to a 2010 survey, would rather use print than digital. Maybe believe that’s because digital textbooks can be perceived as boring, but that’s about to change.

“Publishers are still making a ton of money on print textbooks, so they are not in a hurry to start undermining that with digital sales,” Allen said.

“But they still know that digital is the future and see a lot of potential for it.”

Looking to the future, Cornell and Brown universities have recently begun the transition towards making all of their assigned textbooks digital.

Despite it being a sellers’ market, where professors require students to purchase specific textbooks, publishers will likely have to embrace digital publishing as many students and educators are wanting to turn away from heavy, expensive textbooks.

“To ﬁx the problem they need to fundamentally change the structure of the market and allow consumers to have more power.” Allen said.

Comments

Kevin

January 12, 2012 at 9:44 am

What an excellent idea this is. It both saves money for the schools and also produce books ideally tailored to a specific learning environment. After all, who better knows the needs of students than their teachers and administrators. This is definitely something I’d want to see replicated not just in other schools, but in colleges.

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Linda Brees

January 12, 2012 at 9:46 am

“Maybe believe that’s because digital textbooks can be perceived as boring, but that’s about to change.”

The format can change from print to digital, but it is still a textbook. Most of them aren’t going to be very interesting.

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Denise

January 12, 2012 at 1:01 pm

I don’t perceive students seeing them as any more “boring” digitally than in print. Text books are dry reading for the most part. However, with the digital books, we can tie them into applets, applications, and websites making it much more interactive. As a teacher, though, I’d prefer to be responsible for my content rather than someone else in school. Secondly, I’d like to retain copyright priviledges. It takes a lot of work to write a book, let alone a text. The content plus questions can be quite time consuming. Thus, I think the school got a bargain…but the teachers had to do a lot of work for their $10k unless they plaigerized their question bank and resorces.

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Marianne

January 13, 2012 at 11:20 am

If the district expands beyond math into content areas such as science and history, I would hope that they put some quality controls in place, such as fact-checking and reviews by content specialists.

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Kevin

January 17, 2012 at 9:39 am

That is an interesting point, Denise. I wonder how the copyright works for these teacher-created books. I’d assume that it reverts to the school, but I think it would be fair for these kinds of projects if the teachers got some residuals in case other schools were interested in purchasing those textbooks as well.

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Could ‘open source’ textbooks be cheaper than traditional textbooks? « drwilda

January 17, 2012 at 10:15 am

[...] Education News is reporting in the article, Teacher-Written Digital Textbooks: A Cheaper Alternative? Tired of constantly replacing their outdated — and expensive — statistics textbooks, officials in the Anoka Hennepin School District have let their teachers write their own digital textbooks instead, writes Abigail Wood at the Heartlander. [...]

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Pete

April 18, 2012 at 8:09 pm

As a teacher I would be very concerned about being “required” by my district to write a textbook and having the textbook become the property of the district. Small, rural districts like ours will not have funds to compensate teachers for writing textbooks. I agree that the A.H. district got off cheap if the district retains the rights for the property of the teachers’ work. I would also be very concerned about copyright infringement as I assume many resources in many of these digital texts will come from the internet. Textbook companies employ an army of writers an software developers along with curriculum specialists to put out a quality product. I’m concerned that districts are going to put a project like this (by one, two, or even three teachers) on a reasonable timeline to produce a quality product. I fear that “do this over the summer” will be a common directive that is completely unreasonable.

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Digital textbooks may or may not be cheaper « drwilda

May 21, 2012 at 10:54 pm

[...] the Anoka Hennepin School District have let their teachers write their own digital textbooks instead, writes Abigail Wood at the Heartlander. “The teachers thought we could do a better job writing our own book that ﬁt our state standards [...]

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