10 Years of Change: What Publishers Think

What surprises higher education publishers about the past decade of rapidly changing course materials and academic technologies?

That was among the questions posed to panelists in the Thought Leader presentation Course Materials Today and Tomorrow: Views from Publishing Executives held March 4 at CAMEX 2017 (Campus Market Expo) in Salt Lake City, UT. Here are some of their responses:

Tim Stookesberry, senior vice president education, Wiley: “Being in product development for a long time, I did think about what digital was going to mean. I’m surprised most by how digital has changed the distribution network and we’ve had to change accordingly. Students have a lot of choices: the way people buy materials, what they’re looking for. It’s very dynamic.”

Scott Smith, president, Elsevier Education: “Technology simultaneously changes the way the market actually works and how people acquire materials. It’s a completely different environment in which we have to work. There are more links in the chain.”

Kevin Stone, chief sales and marketing officer, Cengage Learning: “In this day and age to be sending cardboard printed access cards with numbers students have to put in is crazy. We need to fix this. I think we can fix it. It’s about access … all about getting materials on day one.”

Peter Cohen, executive vice president, McGraw-Hill Education: “There’s serious empirical data that using adaptive technology improves student achievement, literally hundreds of data. What surprises me is students love print books. There’s a resounding cry to continue to have print resources.”

Tom Malek, vice president and head of channel partnerships, Pearson Education: “Why does it take so long to change? Uber has come and gone in terms of figuring it out. We all serve the industry of higher education. That tends to go quite slowly … tends to put things in the conceptual rather than the real.”

Where Course Materials Go from Here

Digital formats, adaptive learning, access codes, inclusive access, student user analytics, custom products—the world of higher-education course materials has changed a lot in recent years. What’s next?

A panel of publishing representatives will discuss their views on the evolution of course materials and what tomorrow’s textbook is likely to encompass during the Course Materials eXperience track as part of the 2017 Campus Market Expo (CAMEX) in Salt Lake City, UT, March 3-7. CAMEX is produced by NACS.

Just how course materials can best support student success is a critical component of the discussion, not just for colleges and universities, but also for academic publishers that are encountering dwindling revenues due to declining enrollments, faculty adopting open resources, piracy of textbook content, and other factors.

Moderated by Ashley Gordon, academic resource strategic for NACS, the panel will feature Robin Baliszewski, managing director, higher education sales in North America, Pearson Education; Peter Cohen, president, U.S. K-12 and higher education, McGraw-Hill; Scott Smith, president, Elsevier Education; Kevin Stone, chief sales and marketing officer, Cengage Learning; and Tim Stookesberry, senior vice president, education, Wiley.

Also during the Course Materials eXperience, a second panel will discuss the new role of course materials on campus from various perspectives. Moderated by Mark Palmore, senior vice president, sales, Nebraska Book Co., that panel will include Imelda May, digital and course materials manager, Simon Fraser University Bookstores, Burnaby, BC, Canada; Greg Fenton, CEO and co-founder, RedShelf; and Allyson Mower, head of scholarly communication and copyright, University of Utah Marriott Library, Salt Lake City, UT.

Benefits of Digital Course Materials

A survey by publisher Pearson found that most faculty members view digital course materials as beneficial for their students. Nearly 80% of educators reported that students were helped by using more digital in the classroom, while 70% said the switch from print to digital was important or very important to them personally.

The report also noted that 87% of instructors and 86% of administrators said they believe digital learning is “important in resolving challenges facing the education system.” In the survey, 56% of educators said that more than half of the course materials they now use are digital and 82% have used at least one digital learning product in the past six months.

The majority of students (57%) continue to report they prefer using printed materials to study, but nearly the same amount said they would like to be able to access learning materials online. Most students (57%) said it’s the responsibility of the institution to help them make the shift to digital.

“There is growing recognition of the broad-range benefits—for students, faculty, and institutions—provided by digital learning,” Tom Malek, senior vice president of partnerships at Pearson, said in a news release. “Institutional leaders have an opportunity to further explore how digital can provide a rich, more personalized learning experience for students, while lowering the cost of course materials and providing new insights and data for faculty.”

Tech's Role in Course Content Strategy

How can technology help improve access to education as well as learning outcomes? At the second annual Textbook Affordability Conference, Vic Vuchic, chief innovation officer and executive director of Digital Promise Global, will explore the ways in which tech innovation and collaboration can be harnessed to drive a campus course-materials strategy.

Vuchic will be the keynote luncheon presenter at the conference, to be held April 27-29 at the University of California, Davis. Digital Promise Global is a nonprofit organization working with education leaders, researchers, and learning technology developers to enhance teaching and learning around the world through technology and research.

Other sessions will offer recommendations from a panel of faculty and instructional designers for the successful adoption and use of free and low-cost materials, how campus libraries and IT factor into reducing the cost of course materials, innovative sales and distribution models for capitalizing on the campus store’s business expertise and connection with students, and options for developing “all-source” models of course content.

Attendees will work in teams to discuss the ideas from session presenters and use that advice to start creating course-materials affordability plans for their campus.

Registration is still open for the conference, organized by the National Association of College Stores in collaboration with the California Association of College Stores (CACS), Association of American Publishers (AAP) Higher Education, NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, California State University, and OpenStax.

Digital on the Minds of CAMEX Attendees

Digital course materials was among the hot topics—if not the hottest topic—for campus bookstore attendees at the 2016 Campus Market Expo (CAMEX) in Houston, TX. (Produced by NACS, CAMEX opened last Friday, March 4, and continues through March 8.)

For campus stores, “digital” covers the gamut: PDFs, e-books, electronic coursepacks, access codes, online labs, content delivered through the school’s learning management system, adaptive learning products, and more. Nearly all stores sell the access codes if their faculty have chosen those materials for their classes, but it’s a mixed bag for other forms of digital materials.

While some stores said they’re experimenting with the course-fee model for selected classes—which enables stores to negotiate a much lower cost for digital materials with publishers in exchange for 100% sell-through in the class—others said they are running into some roadblocks. Among the hurdles to more widespread adoption of digital course materials are:

Many textbook titles aren’t available in digital format, especially older titles. Publishers are reluctant to invest in converting backlist titles that only a few faculty are still using, preferring to put money into developing new materials that can incorporate the best features of digital technology.

Providers of digital works are not fully compatible with all of the major point-of-sale (POS) systems used by campus stores, hampering stores’ ability to sell and distribute digital materials to students. Most providers are working with publishers and POS manufacturers to resolve this, but it’s taking time.

Many faculty and students are still not entirely comfortable using solely digital materials. A growing number of students prefer to have both print and digital forms of the same textbook, so that they can easily study in their dorm or home from the print but access the digital in class on their laptop. Students will buy or rent just the digital if it’s cheaper than other options. Faculty are more willing to try digital materials if they see students will save money.

Digital is not always cheaper to produce than print. In addition, for many textbooks, the cost to rent a print copy for the term is less than the digital option.

Some digital materials must be acquired directly from the publisher, creating problems for students on financial aid or who don’t have credit cards.

ConTEXT Looks at New Era of Textbooks

College textbook formats and how students acquire their reading materials have changed considerably in the past decade, as the report Mapping the Learning Content Ecosystem has documented. What these changes mean and how they affect the foreseeable future for faculty, students, publishers, and sellers of content will be explored at Campus Market Expo 2016 (CAMEX), March 4-8 in Houston, TX.

ConTEXT, a mini-conference within CAMEX focusing on textbooks and technology, will take a look at new strategies and best practices, from digital formats and open educational resources to adaptive learning products and text-with-tuition models. Speakers will include Andy Hines, assistant professor and coordinator of the Foresight Program at the University of Houston, who will discuss how to make sense of the shifting course materials landscape.

“Thinking about students, how will the changes in their lives and needs influence higher education and approaches to learning?” Hines wrote in a recent article for The College Store magazine. “These changes may ultimately redefine the notion of what a course material is, as coursework spills over into work, play, relationships, and even participation in civic life.”

The ConTEXT track will feature 15 educational sessions related to course materials. The ConTEXT educational program is underwritten by the NACS Foundation, with support from Follett.

In addition, two showcases—custom/digital content solutions on March 4 and adaptive learning products on March 5—will give an overview of new products and services for academic content and how they benefit students and faculty. Among the participating suppliers are LAD Custom Publishing, RedShelf, XanEdu, Cengage Learning, Elsevier-Health Sciences, Pearson Education, and Wiley.

CAMEX attendees will also be able to learn more at the ConTEXT Pavilion during the trade show (March 6-8). Most of the exhibiting companies involved in course content and materials will be located in the vicinity of the pavilion and many will be demonstrating products in the ConTEXT Presentation Theater.

Webinar Looks at Future of Course Materials

To find out what lies ahead for the creation and distribution of learning content, NACS commissioned an extensive research and analysis project which involved interviews with dozens of people involved in higher education instruction and administration, academic publishing, content distribution and sales, and libraries and educational technology.

The findings from that project and their implications for higher ed will be examined in a free webinar, Exploring the Future Course Content Ecosystem on Campus, on Tuesday, Dec. 1, at 1 p.m. Eastern. The project and webinar were underwritten by the NACS Foundation.

The webinar will touch on changes in teaching and learning—as well as student access and affordability issues—that are driving the development of new kinds of course materials and in-class instructional materials. These include digital versions of textbooks, courseware that combines reading material and teaching modules, adaptive learning content, and open educational resources (OER).

As the needs of faculty and students have shifted over the years, so has the role of the campus bookstore. The webinar will discuss how stores will fit into the new course-content landscape and what strategies stores can adopt to support students’ and instructors’ success.

Presenting the webinar will be Tony Ellis, CAE, vice president, industry advancement, NACS.

Advance registration for the webinar is required. If you haven’t already set up a NACS login, you will be prompted to create one before registering.

Conference to Work on Textbook Affordability

The cost of course materials has become a white-hot issue in higher education, with fingers of blame pointed in multiple directions. The second annual Textbook Affordability Conference hopes to shift the focus to working on solutions to help students.

The 2016 conference—which aims to bring together professionals from across postsecondary academia, educational policymaking, and content production and distribution—will take place April 27-29 at the University of California-Davis.

NACS is coordinating the development of the 2016 program, which will include nationally known speakers, workshops, and discussion. Informational sessions with solution providers may also be available.

The conference is open to provosts and other higher education leaders, faculty, librarians, directors and course materials managers from campus bookstores, political leaders, open education resource developers, content providers, and others.

Registration will open later. Fees will be $400 for government aned institutional attendees, and $700 for representatives of supplier companies. Fees include all sessions, meals, and receptions.

For an overview, go to www.nacs.org/TAC.

Tool That Can Write Textbooks

The old notion that machines will someday replace workers may soon apply to academia. A Pennsylvania State University professor used a robot to build a textbook that he claims saved students $16,000 last semester.

Bart Pursel assembled a textbook for his Information, People, and Technology class using BbookX, a technology developed at Penn State that helps faculty use open-source materials to create content according to topics and keywords. Using the technology, Pursel was able to distribute the textbook to his class for free.

BbookX starts with an instructor creating a digital table of contents and assigning each chapter a topic with text or related keywords. The tool then uses matching algorithms to quickly gather content, according to the university release.

The university is also exploring ways to allow the content to be changed and updated. Professors will still have to review the titles, but the goal is to provide instructors choices to build a better book in the same way Netflix bases movie selections on what a viewer has previously watched.

“While building my textbook, I came across subjects and topics I hadn’t known about before,” Pursel said in a blog for The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I was able to learn something new and then pass that along to my students.”

Digital Textbooks Growing, But Slowly

Does the future of higher education textbooks lie in digital? If so, then that future’s still a ways off, according to data gathered by Verba, which developed software allowing campus stores to let their customers view competitors’ prices on course materials.

Jared Pearlman, co-founder of Verba, shared the findings of his company’s data-gathering in the session Data-Driven Strategies for Course Materials at CAMEX 2015 in Atlanta, GA. Verba tracked actual textbook purchases made by students through the Compare software and found that sales of e-books doubled in the past year, but still only accounted for 2.42% of total textbook sales.

“Digital is still too expensive but, overall, we’re seeing some changes in the marketplace,” Pearlman said. Those changes may bring prices down.

In cases where students have a choice between a used print book or an e-book, about half the time the used book is cheaper than the digital, he noted.

Most academic e-books are available only as rentals. On average, a digital rental is five times more likely to cost more than a print rental, Pearlman said. As a result, print rental “outperforms digital by seven-and-a-half times,” he said.

But there’s a potential game-changer in the works, according to Pearlman: inclusive access pricing, also known as academic content licensing, subscription model, text with tuition, course-fee model, and 100% sell-through model. This involves providing each student with digital access to the required textbook for a fee, which may be folded into tuition, that’s discounted from the usual retail price because the publisher and store are guaranteed sales for the entire class.

Trend Ahead: Change for Publishers

It's no secret that the course materials world is being turned on its ear, with new forms of content, delivery, and distribution. In a Thought Leader session Feb. 20 at CAMEX 2015 in Atlanta, GA, presenter Richard Katz gave a few glimpses of the disruptions facing course materials providers. Katz has been working on a new study, underwritten by the NACS Foundation, to map the current and future course materials ecosystem.

Among the disruptions identified in the study may be a major shift in the role of publishers. Already, publishers are tilting toward developing chunks of academic material, rather than longer book-length materials. Chunks can be better targeted to the objectives of a course and combined to suit the professor's needs.

However, the study's preliminary findings spotted a long-term trend (more than five years away) that may be even more disruptive: publishers may give away course materials. In this business model, publishers would make revenue from a variety of educational services ranging from courseware development to assessment and certification. Many textbook publishers already dabble in such services.

The ecosystem study report will be released in about two months.

Campus Stores Scoping Out Texts and Tech

Collectively, campus bookstores still remain the dominant purveyor of course materials for college and university students. Making those materials available is becoming increasingly complex, with new formats for textbooks and new options for providing them.

On Feb. 20-24, campus bookstores will gather in Atlanta, GA, for the annual Campus Market Expo (CAMEX), a combined professional conference and trade show put on by NACS for collegiate retailers. The stores’ course materials managers and coordinators will be focusing on the ConTEXT track, designed to explore new trends in textbooks and supporting technologies and allow stores to share what’s working.

This year, ConTEXT will discuss the preliminary results of a six-month study of digital course materials, sponsored by the NACS Foundation. Other educational sessions will examine mobile course materials; parsing textbook sales data to help keep prices affordable to students; new software tools for course materials management; how to get started in selling digital content; open educational resources; providing publishing services for faculty-created materials; academic content licensing; research data on student and faculty attitudes toward course materials; trends in health-science textbooks; purchasing habits of students; how adaptive content fits in with print and digital books; sourcing textbooks more efficiently; and what stores can learn from Amazon’s sales tactics and its new campus program.

The Course Content Technology Fair will allow stores to see some of the latest offerings in course materials and related technologies from publishers, digital content platform providers, and textbook management systems. More demonstrations will take place in the designated ConTEXT Pavilion during the trade-show portion of CAMEX.

Since students can’t take advantage of digital tools and content without the necessary hardware, software, and accessories, stores that provide technology products will also head for CAMEX for the related CCRA (Campus Computer Resellers Alliance) Conference. Tech sellers will learn how to better meet the needs of students and faculty, as well as campus IT and other departments.

Integrating Smartphones into the Classroom

Smartphones can be valuable tools in the classroom, if teachers find the right way to use them. Unfortunately, the devices can’t be controlled the way textbook content can be.

Solutions range from the total bans on cellphones in the classroom to allowing students to use their smartphones as they please. Some instructors use social media to engage their students, but blogger Dexter McMillan suggests the technology has turned teachers into advertisers competing for consumers’ attention.

“Teachers are selling a product, knowledge, to their students—much of which has no interest or practical use to the majority of students,” he wrote. “Teachers are advertisers selling the most undesirable product on Earth: History. Math. Grammar.”

Teachers used to be able to stand in front of a class and lecture, but technology has created a more collaborative style of instruction that isn’t solely measured by grades. McMillan wrote that teachers need to reclaim that content control with more and better tools.

“Without control of these devices, technology will not be able to move the classroom experience forward in a significant or profound way,” he said. “Grumpy cat, sports highlights, and pictures from the party on the weekend will continue to dominate classroom attention.”

Team Seeks Next-Generation Textbook

First came the print textbook. Then digital course materials arrived. What’s next?

An interdisciplinary team at Arizona State University hopes to figure that out, with funding from the National Science Foundation’s Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies program.

The team’s work is intended to lead to the development of the “postdigital textbook,” defined in an ASU press release as “a new type of educational technology that combines personalized learning with community-driven features that encourage collaboration and resource sharing, and emphasize learning as a social process.”

The first phase of the project will involve researching teaching and learning behaviors. Ultimately, working prototypes of postdigital textbooks will be tested in classrooms.

“This project is about determining how we need to design textbooks of the future so that they adjust to the strengths and limitations of individuals while also helping students build 21st-century skills like working collaboratively in groups and curating and presenting multimedia resources,” said team member Ed Finn, director of the Center for Science and the Imagination and an assistant professor at ASU.

Report: Digital Is the Only Way to Go

Developing interactive digital course materials is the best recourse for textbook publishers to regain sales lost to rentals and used books, said a recent report from research firm McKinsey & Co.

McKinsey’s three-year study of the college textbook market showed a steady rise in the number of copies rented by students, accompanied by a slide in the volume of used textbooks bought. Sales of new textbooks also took a hit during that time, but were partly bolstered by purchases to stock rental programs.

By 2018, McKinsey predicted, rentals and used books will each account for 30% of college textbooks, while new books will slip to 26%. Plain-Jane e-books will get 5% and “no buy” options such as sharing with a friend, borrowing from a library, or pirating content will make up the remaining 9%.

Although McKinsey acknowledged that custom textbooks have helped some publishers hang onto sales, “the custom-publishing market is already quite mature, which means that growth opportunities are limited,” the report said.

“The larger opportunity for publishers lies in the creation of dynamic digital-learning resources,” the report noted, adding, “Time is not on the side of textbook publishers. They face a near-term competitive threat from the rental market, even as they serve a customer base that is increasingly dominated by digital natives.”

E-Textbooks Could Look Like Mozart Project

One promise of digital course material is its potential to provide students with interactive content that engages in multiple ways. That could look something like The Mozart Project.

The Mozart Project is an e-book and mobile app created by Pipedreams Media, which spent 18 months collecting information on the composer. The e-book would run nearly 430 pages if it were a traditional printed volume, according to the two British app developers who helped create it.

“It looks and behaves more like an app than like a conventional e-book, and it is part of a growing trend in hybrid apps, e-books, and what were formerly known as record albums, in which new releases make the most of the multimedia capabilities of computers, smartphones, and tablets,” wrote Allan Kozinn, music critic for The New YorkTimes.

The e-book contains more than three hours of music, two hours of video, and exclusive commentary from top musicians and composers from the classical world. It covers each phase of Mozart’s life and times, with chapters that discuss different categories of his music.

There are plenty of illustrations, examples of manuscripts, and pop-up reference material that are accessed by touching bold-faced words and phrases in the text. There are also video performances and documentaries that were filmed for the book, making it the kind of resource that could easily find its way into a music-appreciation classroom.

Students Join Profs to Diss Digital Plan

Students at Alamo Colleges in Texas said “No thanks” to an effort to save them money on course materials.

A petition signed by 1,000 students opposed the Alamo district’s plan to adopt the same digital and open-source materials for large courses offered across multiple campuses, a move designed to save money. Instead of buying print books individually, students would pay a fee in advance to gain online access to their reading materials.

But many students didn’t think much of the plan, according to the San Antonio Express-News. Some told the newspaper they didn’t have the funds to buy e-readers in order to be able to carry their digital course materials to class, or anywhere else. Some preferred print formats and didn’t want to be forced to study from a screen. Others said they’ve been able to find traditional textbooks at affordable prices by shopping around on their own.

The district, which encompasses five community colleges, decided in January to go ahead with the proposal despite complaints from faculty, who felt the administration was taking away their right to select materials for the courses they teach.

The Campus Bookstore Is Where It's At

In this TV news report, the Fox Business channel takes a look at how textbook rentals are ramping up in campus bookstores, the latest move by stores to help bring down the cost of course materials for students. The report features an interview with Alan Martin, CEO of CampusBookRentals, one of several companies that provide rental stock and technical support to college stores.

Martin explains why his company chose to work through campus stores rather than go direct to students. The bookstore, he says, sits at the “epicenter” of campus life and “holds the competency to serve students better than anyone else.”

Edugames Growing, Although Not in Hi-Ed

Since college students aged 18-24 have spent most of their young lives interacting with vivid video games and special screen effects, some educators are concerned they’ll be unwilling or unable to read through numerous pages of text for class assignments.

That raises the question of whether more course materials should be transformed into video games to hold students’ attention and allow them to engage more fully with the subject matter.

Educational gaming is already on the rise. The New Media Consortium Horizon Project 2013,Higher Education Edition, predicts game-based learning will be widely adopted within two to three years.

In a presentation at the Serious Play 2013 conference in August, data analysis firm Ambient Insight forecast a 10.1% jump in game-based learning for North America by 2017, with 15.3% growth in mobile edugames alone. But most of those games aren’t destined for college courses.

According to Ambient, only 8% of mobile learning apps are designed for higher education, compared to 40% for preschoolers to second grade. One of the biggest barriers to creating games appropriate for higher ed is the complexity of the material. Games helping preschoolers to count or recognize shapes are much easier to develop than games on quantum physics or 16th-century Asian history.

Rather than full-scale edugames, the answer may lie in gamification—adding elements of gaming to course materials to illustrate specific concepts, test skills and comprehension, or provide incentives to students.

Soccer Moms Lead Tablet Buyers

As of May 2013, about 34% of all adults in the U.S. owned a tablet device, almost double the number from a year ago. The percentage comes from the spring phone survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which has been tracking tablet ownership since the release of the iPad.

It may be hard to believe that tablet ownership went from zero to more than a third of the total American adult population in just a few years. So who’s buying all those tablets? It turns out the typical purchaser is a female college graduate living in the surburbs, age 35-44, with a household income of at least $75,000.

But the telling characteristic of the average tablet owner is having a kid at home. In the last year, custodial parents of minor children became the fastest-growing tablet-owner demographic, jumping from 26% last spring to 50% in May.

The rise in tablet ownership is mirrored in the educational world as well. A Campus Technology article reported tablets represented 35% of all personal computing devices shipped to U.S. schools in 2012, almost twice as many as the preceding year. Obviously, both parents and school personnel see tablets as an important tool in youngsters’ learning.

However, the article noted, the boost in tablet purchases may be spurred mostly by manufacturers that have developed educational content for the devices and are willing to work directly with schools to fulfill their curriculum needs.