The Top 9 Benefits of Online Publishing for K12 Curriculum Development

With more and more individuals gaining access to the internet globally, online content consumption has manifolded. Naturally, this has had a negative impact on traditional book publishing, with print book sales falling by 6.5% in 2022. On the flip side, online publishing has taken the industry by storm.

Owing to this, educational institutions have also started shifting to digital book publishing. The best part about this is that online books come digitally wrapped with numerous benefits for K12 curriculum development. Let’s find out what they are. 

Table of Contents

• Top 9 Benefits of Online Publishing

1. eBooks Are Easy to Create and Distribute
2. Digital Books Are Easy to Upgrade
3. eBooks Can Be Made Interactive
4. Links to External Sources Can Be Added
5. Short Notes Can Be Added to eBooks
6. Digital Books Save Space and Environment
7. Helps Track and Assess Performance
8. Digital Books Are a Cost-Effective Option
9. Digital Books Allow for Collaboration

• The End Note

With online publishing, many publishing software have also emerged. These have made the creation of eBooks very easy.

Unlike traditional publishing, which consumes a lot of time to create books, eBooks can be created in just a few clicks. In addition, as a content creator, you can opt to enable DRM protection for eBooks.

This makes them secure and protects them from unauthorized use. Thus, eBooks can be distributed safely to K12 students.

Online publishing makes it possible to upgrade content easily, unlike in the case of traditional publishing. In the latter, for an upgrade, it is required to reprint the book, and that can be extremely time-consuming and expensive.

Using a cloud-based platform, digital books can be easily upgraded. In a cloud-based software the contents of the book are stored online, in one place. To upgrade it, one only needs to edit the existing information.

The edits will automatically reflect in the distributed eBooks, and this will ensure that students have access to up-to-date information.

To keep the interest and engagement levels of K12 students high, digital book publishing offers features for interactivity.

As a curriculum creator or an educator, you can embed eBooks with multimedia-rich content. This could include videos, audio, animation, images, etc. Viewing this kind of content increases the learning and retention capacities of students. 

In addition, digital book publishing offers another set of interactive features that help personalize an eBook. These include adjustments to the display of the eBook such as the font size, the colors, the brightness and so on.

These days most assignments require the use of more information than what’s available in a given  eBook. This is where search engines come into play. Since a lot of unreliable websites are available on the web, misinformation can be easily spread. 

To combat this, online publishing platforms offer the feature of external linking. Using this, an educator can add links to reliable sites from where K12 students can find the additional information needed to complete their assignments.

This saves time for the students and limits the spread of unreliable information.

Online publishing platforms enable a curriculum creator to add short notes to chapters. They can be in the form of key takeaways from the chapter.

Sometimes, the study material in an academic year can be overwhelming for students. So, studying just these short notes can help learners retain and remember the gist of the chapter during a test.

With traditional publishing, one needs to make space to accommodate physical textbooks. Printed books are also quite harmful to the environment as they’re made from paper, which as we all know, comes from trees.

However, with online publishing, multiple eBooks can be accessed from a single device. The negative impacts of cutting down trees is also eliminated. 

Since, there’s no need to store books physically, school bags weigh less while accessibility to education increases.

Online publishing platforms offer the feature of learning analytics reports, which help curriculum creators and educators track the engagement level of students. This gives insights into parts of the course that are most or least engaging. 

In addition, the reports contain evaluations of a students’ performance in tests. These assist content creators or educators in understanding the strong and weak areas of a class of students and help them make adjustments accordingly.

Traditional publishing involves the printing of thousands of copies of textbooks. This process also involves the cost of packaging, distribution, and reprinting. 

On the other hand, online publishing does away with all the hassling costs involved with traditional publishing. Digital books are far cheaper as publishing online  involves making one digital copy of a book and digitally distributing it amongst students.

With online publishing, educators can opt to share notes with students. Using this feature, students can also share their doubts digitally with educators. The latter can resolve them and share their feedback online.

Furthermore, students can also share notes with their classmates. As a result, this fosters an in-depth understanding of the topic and a collaborative form of learning.

From what we now know perhaps the online education is better than traditional education debate can now end. Clearly both have their benefits, but the ease of digital publishing makes online education more appealing to publishers and content creators.

The only question that remains now is how one can leverage these pros for K12 curriculum development? The good news is, there is one platform that is dedicated to creating, publishing and distributing digital educational content. 

KITABOO is a cloud-based platform that protects your content with DRM. It also comes with a host of interactive elements and analytics that can enhance your publishing efforts.

To know more about how online publishing can help your K12 content development, write to us at KITABOO@hurix.com.