Books

The Promise (and Perils) of Digital Textbooks

Whether buying whole texts, curating digital content or writing their own, educators want flexibility and reliability — which often means having printed materials on hand.

The New Media Consortium's 2014 Horizon Report K-12 Edition noted that although digital textbooks have become a mainstay in higher education, they have been slower to infiltrate K-12. The report's authors added, however, that the "financial and educational benefits of digital learning materials will eventually outweigh the outdated paper textbook dependence in K-12 education, and gradual adoption of digital textbooks is expected."

THE Journal recently spoke with teachers and administrators in several districts that are experimenting with digital versions of textbooks from traditional publishers as well as those curating digital material to compose new, more personalized texts for their students. From their responses, it is clear that the promise of digital texts has been matched by frustrating deployment issues.



Learning From a Rocky Rollout

As with many newer technologies, the earliest adopters were going to take the arrows. And that is what happened to Virginia's Fairfax County Public Schools, which has been working with digital textbooks in world languages, mathematics and social studies for more than five years.

Craig Herring, the director of preK-12 curriculum and instruction, said the district made the mistake of thinking it could do away with hardcover social studies books, buy everyone a license for an online version and then have classroom sets of hardcover books for students who might have trouble accessing the online text. "When we rolled it out, we went to classrooms to see how teachers were using them," he said. "The teachers were resistant and the kids were resistant. We found that the eleventh- and twelfth-graders really hated it. We hypothesized that they had set their study habit routines and didn't want to change them."

The teachers did not think it was a better way to go instructionally. "By the time the kids started up the laptops in class and the teachers resolved any technical issues," he added, "they thought 'I just wasted 15 minutes of my class when they could have just opened their book.' "

The district rolled out digital math textbooks three years ago, and found they had more interactive elements and videos, said Rose Moore, the preK-12 mathematics coordinator. But usage still varies from school to school and teacher to teacher. The district also purchased hardback copies for 40 percent of the students, and since then some schools have purchased more.

"When we first rolled out the math textbooks from Pearson we had tons of problems," Herring admitted. The district approved the digital textbooks for more than 150,000 students over the summer "and just turned it over to teachers in the fall and said 'Have at it.' Well, teachers knew how to put a book down in front of a student, but when you talk about issues of getting online, passwords and troubleshooting which platform the student is using, it was a nightmare," he said. "We spent a lot of time trying to figure out the technology piece of it and that hampered the use of the instructional piece in the first year. We had very little usage. We didn't have our ducks in a row and it really hurt us."

One major problem was that teachers had to go into the online system and register each student, which took a lot of work. Through a glitch with Pearson, Herring said, all the students' registrations were erased. The teachers had spent all this time inputting their 150 students, and now they had to go back and put them all in again.