The Delivery of Digital Content from Textbook Publishers Matters

Digital content supplied by publishers is convenient for faculty to adopt and studies show students support its inclusion in courses. It also affects a significant number of students. In the 2016-17 school year, 60% of students polled stated they accessed the publisher web content while taking college classes. While this contributes to the rising costs of textbooks, and increases the value of Open Educational Resources, there are times when the digital content is advantageous. For example, sometimes there are no appropriate OERs available for the content that is necessary and the digital content may be the only academically acceptable option. Likewise, if the school has mandated the use of the book, or the text is already needed for the course, the content is merely a free addition.

It may be clear that the predeveloped content makes it easier for instructors to offer online content. Further integrating the content with an LMS allows the content to seamlessly interact with the LMS and its gradebook. Nevertheless, this is not an issue about learning and pedagogy, but out of convenience. A simple pedagogical question arises with digital content from textbook publishers that is often not address.

Does integrating digital content from textbook publishers affect the performance of students in online literature and writing courses and do students prefer it?

In a pilot study, Wolf and Richardson (2018) investigated this very issue. They ran a pilot study on a class testing the performance and student preference of integrate textbook digital content. The study investigated variances student progress and preference of textbook publisher digital content between the modes of delivery. In general, publisher digital content can be accessed by either hyperlinking to the publisher’s website or integrating the content within the LMS. There are two ways to integrate the content and they are:

• Plug-ins. These suffer from required updates and poorer user experiences 
• Learning Tool Interoperability (LTI). This for is a direct link to the content is its stability makes it more preferable. 

The study use Pearson REVEL. The only integration option was to use a plug-in. Consequently, the study compared the differences of the plug-in with simply hyperlinking the material.

After setting the conditions to control the experiment, the pilot study revealed that:

·       Students performed better when the content was integrated with a plug in

·       Student rate of completion was also better when the content was integrated

·       Students also preferred the content integrated

There was also an unexpected result. There was a small percentage of helpdesk calls from students requesting assistance with the digital content. This has the added benefit of both:

• having students spend more cognitive time learning the material and less on navigation 
• Freeing up man-hours from the IT department 

While more study is required, the study is one of the first to confirm that evidence suggest that students will perform better when the have less impediments in navigation. Integrating publisher digital content, instead of sending them to a labyrinth of pages on the publisher’s website reduces some cognitive load and encourages students to spend more time in the learning environment. Consequently, it contributes to a large level of student success.

Reference

Wolf, D. & Richardson, A. (2018). Assessing the Pedagogical Effectiveness and Student Preference of Publisher Digital Content Presentation in Online Literature and Writing Instruction. In Proceedings of E-Learn: World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education (pp. 355-359). Las Vegas, NV, United States: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).