Are you still looking for reasons to create interactive textbooks for students? Well, it’s 2019, and most schools and universities have already accepted digital textbooks as the future of education. If you draw a comparison between the two, i.e., traditional textbooks and interactive textbooks, you will see that e-textbooks clearly fare better than regular textbooks. For K-12 students, interactive textbooks/e-textbooks act as a learning companion, as it offers constant interaction.
Moreover, if you plan to keep your target audience engaged, you need to provide them with something that will hold their interest for a longer time. For these reasons, and many more listed below, publishers should really consider creating interactive textbooks for engaging K-12 students.
How Publishers Benefit from Creating Interactive Textbooks
Easy to Create
With the availability of eBook creation software, it has become very easy to create an interactive textbook. You can now learn how to create a digital textbook in no time. They are even quite simple to operate, with drag and drop widgets and customizable layouts. Here’s our list of the 8 best eBook creation software.
Easy to Publish
These software tools also allow you to publish the content. The main concern while you create a textbook is the quality of the final output which will be accessed by students. With these online tools, publishers can preview what the final output would look like and then hit the publish button after being completely satisfied with the result. And if you find a typo in the text after publishing, it can be easily corrected later.
Easy to Deliver
Once published, the etextbooks should be easily accessible by the users. For this reason, publishers usually opt for a content delivery platform that is compatible with multiple operating systems and on different devices- be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop or a desktop computer. Here’s more on how to distribute ebooks on online platforms.
Low Cost of Production
Unlike the traditional printing business, digital publishing helps publishers to reduce their cost of production by eliminating many aspects that are not required. By cutting down expenses for printing, transportation, warehousing etc, publishers can save a huge sum. Here’s how to select the best Digital Publishing Platform.
Secure Distribution
To prevent any copyright infringement, piracy or illegal downloading of content, publishers can secure their etextbooks with DRM. DRM protection ensures that only people with permissions can access the content. Here’s more on What is DRM (Digital Rights Management) and why you need it?
Keeping all these benefits in mind, publishers prefer creating etextbooks for K-12 learners. But merely making print books available in digital format does not guarantee engagement. It has to offer more in terms of interaction, so that students find the learning experience more interesting and helpful.
Whitepaper:
The State of Digital Content in Global K-12 Education
Here’s how publishers can create interactive textbooks in order to engage K-12 students.
1. Provide a Smart Interface
Growing up amidst technology, K-12 students are now quite used to getting things done at the click of a button. When it comes to education, technology once again plays a crucial role in keeping them in sync with the modern learning styles. We now have eBooks that are more than just PDF renderings of print textbooks.
They are more interactive and intuitive, and keep the students engaged in the learning process. Therefore, the interface you use must be easy-to-operate, intuitive and responsive. A delay in page load can ruin the overall experience. Hence, publishers must first ensure that a well-designed app with a user-friendly interface is being used to create and deliver the learning output.
2. Overcome Limited Attention Span with Interactive Elements
You might have experienced this yourself; our concentration tends to waver if the content we are viewing is not engaging enough. Be it an online video or a live seminar. Similarly, students also experience the same lack of attention when it comes to learning content that is uninteresting, plain and boring.
With interactive textbooks, you can ensure that students are actively engaging with the courseware with the help of elements like click and reveal, drag and drop etc. Constant interaction builds focus and leads to better retention of knowledge.
3. Help Them Understand Concepts Better with Videos
Many a times, students are unable to understand a concept just by reading about it. They may not be able to mentally visualize something like molecular reaction. This is where interactive textbooks come to use. With videos and hyperlinks embedded in the etextbooks, students always have access to additional information that will help them understand better.
Watching a video of how something works is always better than reading about it. They can pause the video, play it again, and visit external websites in order to gain more information and clarity about the given topic.
4. Create Audiobooks
You can create an audiobook for students to listen. Some students are auditory learners, they learn and memorize better when they listen to stuff. You can provide an option for them to access the audio version of the book. This way, you will be catering to both visual as well as auditory learners.
5. Provide Updated Content
The syllabus may or may not change every year. But, there are certain facts, figures and statistics that are subject to change. And in order to provide K-12 students with the correct and latest data, the etextbooks need to be updated as and when required.
An interactive textbook is usually created on a cloud-based digital publishing platform. Meaning, data is stored on the cloud and can be updated anytime. This helps you provide up-to-date content to students. In case the content is being updated, publishers can easily alert the students about the same through notifications.
6. Make the Course Interesting with Gamification
Gamifying the course includes adding certain gaming elements to keep the learning process fun and engaging. Adding a leaderboard to keep track of scores, providing virtual badges and points on completion of each quiz are motivating factors that compel students to learn and perform better in their tests.
7. Create a Digital Library
Just like a physical library, where students go to find additional learning resources, you can create digital library for the etextbook users. A digital content library for K-12 students must have informative and easy-to-understand videos and text material for all their subjects. Publishers can also purchase digital libraries from vendors, saving them the time, effort and expense of creating one themselves.
8. And Lastly, Reduce Students’ Financial Burden
Students are grappling with the rising costs of textbooks. This has driven them towards rental book markets and second-hand books. So, as a digital publisher, you can try to reduce this burden by offering etextbooks at affordable rates.
By offering a subscription-based model, you can club multiple eBooks together and offer an affordable package to students for each semester. This is more of a means to keep your revenue stream flowing. But affordable books are something that every student hopes for. So, by reducing their expenses you can ensure that students are interested in buying your etextbooks for its interactivity and cost factor.
Conclusion:
Interactive textbooks are a means by which publishers and educational institutes aim to keep the students engaged in the learning process. Today, schools and universities focus more on immersive learning for knowledge retention than just completing their syllabus.
And to help them achieve this target, publishers can create digital textbooks loaded with interactive elements to ensure that students stay engaged and learn better.
Related:
Are Digital Textbooks More Effective for K-12 Curriculum
How Can eTextbooks Help K-12 Publishers, Institutes & Students
DISCOVER HOW AN INTERACTIVE EBOOK PUBLISHING & DELIVERY PLATFORM CAN HELP YOU
Kitaboo is a cloud-based content platform to create-publish & distribute interactive mobile-ready ebooks.
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