The Textbook as a Metaphor for CoursewareJames Williams The metaphor of textbook-as-courseware has important immediate consequences. The book's cover is a student's first view of a course, as is the courseware's login mechanism. Consequently, esthetics are a major design consideration. The combined cover and login page contains the names of both the publishing authors and the individual student logging in, so there is from the beginning a connotation that the student is a coauthor of an emerging work, with the student providing answers to the text's exercises. The book's preface is a student's user manual. As such, it must be read before proceeding with the main body of the work. As with most textbooks, there are separate versions for students and instructors, with a separate instructors preface that is not available to students. The table of contents becomes the student's dashboard, or in the instructor's version, the instructor's dashboard. It not only provides links to individual sections but also tells how the student is doing on each chapter and section. In the instructor's version, the table of contents tells how the class is doing as a whole and provides links to individual student pages. This is accomplished via per-section page notes listing the students in the class. The page notes are implemented using the easily described but challenging mousepoint event. A test illustration of these ideas is given in a treatment of voting theory. The presented material is adapted from David Lippman's Mathematics in Society1. In this implementation, student progress is reported via colored bullets, with one color per letter grade. The table of contents contains a hidden list of prerequisites, and each section is displayed to the student only after meeting the prerequisites. As an example, the preface is a prerequisite to all of the other sections. Each section is divided into topics, with colored bullets indicating progress on each topic. This fine-grained feedback addresses the increasingly common student view that there's little point in learning what isn't going to be graded. Another philosophy implemented in the demonstration courseware is that each major topic should be accompanied by at least two examples, one for the instructor to present, and one for the class to work through together. In each case, the second example takes the form of an exercise whose solution is initially hidden. The demonstration expands somewhat on the original text, partly due to the need for examples, partly due to the need for exercises testing each presented topic, and partly due to the inclusion of additional material that I have found to be useful in teaching voting theory. By analogy with computer games, the text does not tell the student the answers to the exercises, but merely indicates when success is achieved, first through feedback on topics studied and then through allowing progress to the next level. By contrast, the instructor's view of a student's work displays wrong answers in red, owing to the instructor's need for an immediate thorough understanding of the student's progress. The courseware algorithms are implemented using javaScript, AJAX, PHP, and MySQL, with the result that near real-time performance is achieved. Answer keys accommodate both fixed answers and algorithms that recognize multiple correct answers. They are stored on the server in an encoded form and downloaded as needed for client-side checking whenever the student refreshes a page. The student's responses are handled by a collection of client-side widgets that accommodate various forms of responses, calculate appropriate penalties for wrong answers, and check response correctness. Currently, each correct answer has a maximum value of one point, but this is controlled by the widgets and could easily be generalized. An online demonstration is available at pagenotes.com/MathInSociety. You can log in to Section 1 as "admin" with password "easy". Feel free to experiment, as the Section 1 database is reloaded periodically. Creating a website that is at once an online textbook and its associated courseware has allowed a great deal of simplification and improved ease of use. However, it is also a break with tradition. The achieved simplicity is at odds with both the philosophy and the detailed requirements of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)2. The amount of programming involved, while requiring a good deal of thought, is relatively small compared to the course-specific information content. Similar observations apply when comparing MathInSociety with courseware systems such as David Lippman's IMathAS3 or Erica Melis' ActiveMath4. MathInSociety is at heart a textbook suitable for a single course, while the latter systems attempt reusability beyond basic Internet support and offer a focus for academic research. MathInSociety is not unique as an online interactive textbook. The Inkling iPad app5 and the Amelox College Tutor series6 also provide interactive textbooks consisting of traditional text followed by online quizzes. MathInSociety differs in its ability to provide instant overview information for the instructor. ___________________ 1. David Lippman, "Voting Theory, edition 1.2. (Preference Schedules)" in Math in Society: A survey of mathematics for the liberal arts major. Pierce College. November 2009. 2. Advanced Distributed Learning, SCORM 2004, 4th Edition, Version 1.1, August 14, 2009. 3. David Lippman, IMathAS, an Internet Mathematics Assessment System, Pierce Collete, 2006-2009. 4. Erica Melis et al, ActiveMath, University of Saarland, 2001-2011. 5. Adam Lashinsky, "Inkling: The tablet textbook breakthrough," Fortune Magazine online, March 23, 2011. 6. Rolf W. Seebach, "The Amelox College Tutor provides Online Interactive Textbooks and Instruction Manuals", Amelox Incorporated, Sunnyvale California, as viewed March 31, 2011. 3/31/2011 |