This is a question for e-Literate readers who are teachers. I’m trying to understand how instructors in different disciplines choose their books for a class. My sense is that it varies widely by discipline. For example, my wife teaches a lot of English Composition, so the didactic manual isn’t as important as the anthology of short stories and/or essays. I would imagine that her selection criteria for a good anthology would be quite different than, say, a macroeconomics professor looking for a good textbook. And the macroeconomics professor, in turn, might have very different criteria than an art history professor.
All of this matters because it will have a profound influence on how content is digitized, disaggregated, and made available under open licenses. The change is likely to be different discipline by discipline, depending on how well the decision process of the faculty works in the new digital world. Many composition teachers would probably like a world in which they could assemble their own anthologies. On the other hand, if you’re an economics professor who tends to use Greg Mankiw’s book because you like his overall take on economics, a disaggregated, digital world might offer you a different set of pros and cons.
So I’m asking: How do you choose your texts for class? Do you go by publisher/brand? By author? Do you look for a particular theme? Do you think about cost for the students, or open licenses? Is convenience a factor? Please let me know in the comments thread, and please don’t forget to tell me what subject you teach as part of your answer.
Great question Michael! I think this DOES vary widely by discipline.
In art history, we used to want textbooks that had beautiful color images of the objects that the students needed to study – and we also used to need a place where all that factual information could live (now we have wikipedia and so many other fabulous museum websites). In fact, although the text itself was not engaging to students, I used the textbook just for the images for years.
Because images used to be scarce – if you were studying anything somewhat out of the ordinary, your teacher would leave the slides in the slide library for students to visit and take notes from. We lived in a world of multiples, but they were still rare mutliples.
Now of course, students can use google images and find high resolution images of most works in the most art history courses. So what is the textbook good for now? The images are still beautiful, but clearly less necessary in that format.
In art history, we clearly need to re-think the textbook – we still need pictures – but if students and teachers still want a printed book, can we just use smaller black and white images as memory-aids, and provide references to the websites where high resolution images can be found? That would certainly make the (printed) textbook a lot cheaper for students! And wouldn’t it be better after all if students didn’t find everything in one place? If they were directed to go to the Louvre website to see works of art there, and to the Prado’s website to see works of art there? What a different experience that would provide!
Lots to think about…
“Many composition teachers would probably like a world in which they could assemble their own anthologies.”
We just came out with our second volume of Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. It’s an open textbook series of essays written to students by teachers about writing. Teachers are liking it because they can mix and match the different chapter together however they like. Students like it because each chapter has a different voice speaking to them.
The last two times I was able to select my own textbook, I talked to my students about what they wanted/needed. In both cases the number one thing they mentioned was needing a low cost or free text. In one case, I was able to find a free online text from O’Reilly Safari (now a pay service). In the other case, I used online articles from a variety of sources. I think the second option was more work, but it ended up being a much better option. The students had access to multimedia resources which in some cases were interactive. I ended up asking the students to find resources for the second half of the class and that was a useful way to give them ownership of their learning.