Interactivity Takes Place of Reading

While electronic devices may be distracting in the classroom, long readings in dull textbooks can be like a sleeping pill for many students. The online learning platform zyBooks is trying to change that.

The website replaces text with learning activities such as questions and animation. Instructors at nearly 250 universities are using the platform instead of traditional textbooks to help students engage with the material, according to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I say an animation is worth 5,000,” Frank Vahid, computer science and engineering professor at the University of California, Riverside, and co-founder of zyBooks, told UCR Magazine last spring. “So we don’t have to write as much because we can replace a whole page of text with an animation or with learning questions.”

Platform creators also took a look at ways to improve homework. zyBooks integrates assignments into the platform, which are personalized to students’ ability levels. It also allows a way for instructors to track progress.

Students can subscribe to the service for $40-$60 per class, with discounts available for subscription renewals and extensions. The company offers special pricing for high schools and large numbers of multiterm subscriptions.

A two-year study of nearly 2,000 students done by Zyante Inc., the company founded by Vahid and Smita Bakshi, a former UC Davis engineering professor, found that those using zyBooks averaged a quarter-grade higher than those using traditional content. In addition, a controlled group of 136 students showed they spent twice as much time using the interactive zyBooks material when compared with reading electronic content.

Wikipedia Becomes an Educational Tool

Professors used to warn their students not to rely on Wikipedia. It wasn’t viewed as a source that always provided correct information. That perception is beginning to change.

Now, some instructors offer credit to students who contribute to the online encyclopedia, either by writing an article or editing one already on the site. For example, nearly 10,000 students from community colleges to Ivy League schools have contributed 44,000 printed pages to Wikipedia for the Wiki Education Foundation project that launched in 2010, according a report for eCampus News.

Wikipedia is still not thought of as a primary source, but the project has found students feel a sense of accountability because tens of thousands of people serving as editors and fact-checkers on the foundation site are making sure the information they provide is accurate.

“Students are recognizing the value of peer review,” said Michele Van Hoeck, a professor at the California Maritime Academy, Vallejo. “One student was thrilled that someone else on Wikipedia had edited his work. You’d think a person might feel that was a negative, but to him, it was really exciting his idea was continuing, that someone read it and made it better.”

Study Finds Students Have Less Homework

While some parents think their kids are being bombarded with homework assignments, the annual Brown Center Report on American Education paints quite a different picture.

The percentage of 17-year-olds who reported having between one and two hours of homework on a typical school night fell from 27% in 1984 to 23% in 2012. In another study, the University of California-Los Angeles found that the percentage of college freshmen nationwide who remembered having six or more hours of homework a week as a high school senior dropped from 50% in 1986 to 38% in 2012.

“It still doesn’t look like kids are overworked,” Tom Loveless, an education researcher who conducted the Brown Center Report for the Brookings Institute, told USA Today. “The percentage who are overworked is really small.”

The study should help combat the perception some parents have that homework loads are out of control. Some school districts are even thinking about placing time limits on assignments or making homework optional.

However, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found that the 17-year-olds who reported having no homework at all went from 27% in 1984 to 22% in 2012. The NAEP study also found that nine-year-olds were the only students who reported an increase in homework assignments, with 22% of the students reporting no homework in 2012 compared to 35% in 1984.

Tablet Computers in the Classroom

This short YouTube video shows how a class at True Light Middle School in Hong Kong used tablet computers to learn English.

The class was divided into teams and assigned the task of writing an acrostic poem, a poem that uses the first letter, syllable, or word of each line to spell out a word or a message.  Students had to use the tablet to write and create a video of the poem, and then present it to the class.

Requesting your Use Cases...

A number of the digital content projects NACS is involved with on behalf of college stores have reached a stage where we require greater input and involvement from stores. To streamline the process of gathering input, we will be adopting a format for developing "use cases" that can be employed with several different groups. In this instance, use cases are stories about how people successfully and/or unsuccessfully complete transactions for digital content (e-textbooks, digital course materials, print-on-demand, etc.) through college stores. We are looking for college store volunteers willing to help us develop a set of use cases (individually and/or collaboratively) that we can use in response to requests from projects like the CSU Digital Marketplace, OhioLink digital textbook prototype, IMS' e-Textbook taskforce, in addition to others. Contribution of use cases is a critical process to facilitate college store input into future digital initiatives.

Use cases are a common modeling technique in systems development in which we identify stories or scenarios that capture the sequence of events that occur when an individual (actor) attempts to complete a process (in this case, a digital transaction through a college store). A use case answers a question, for example, "How do I (as a student) purchase digital resources for my biology class through the college store?" There are a number of scenarios by which this could happen. The use case breaks this down into the multiple possible scenarios and eventually into individual actions or events, along with the interactions required to achieve the goal. For example, one use case might describe the process by which students purchase content via "hang tags" with access codes. Another use case might describe a similar scenario where access codes are generated at the point of sale, either at the in-store register or online. Yet another use case might describe how students could purchase content using in-store print-on-demand technology. Other possible use cases might describe scenarios by which college stores could broker transactions for content provided through campus course management systems (e.g., Blackboard, WebCT, Sakai, Desire2Learn, Angel, etc.)

This is an opportunity for college stores to participate in defining and designing how we would like to see the transactions take place within our stores for digital content. We need individuals with store-level expertise and ideas about how college stores might be involved with such transactions to assist with developing these use cases. Most use cases are only a couple pages in length and at this stage they do not need to be completely detailed. The outcomes from this process will be used to help communicate to other stakeholder groups how college stores see themselves being involved in future digital content transactions. If you are willing to help develop the use case scenarios, even just one, please send your ideas to Mark Nelson, NACS' Digital Content Strategist (mnelson@nacs.org). Questions about developing the scenarios, or ideas you have for a scenario (even if you do not have time for scenario development), are also very welcome.