About me: Ruth Jelley
I spent nearly 10 years working in publishing and editing in Australia and the UK. I have a professional obsession with ebooks and the systems they intersect with. I competed a minor masters thesis on the state of play of ebooks in Australia in 2012.
I've been working on open education projects at La Trobe Uni since late 2012.
I wear a lot of purple.

First mention of the potential of ebooks - mobility, flexibility - in 2010 report.
In the 2011 report they were flagged as being on the one-year horizon.
Books really took off in 2009 in the USA, with a 2-3 year lag on comparative take-off in Australia. Hence, Australia falls about 2-3 years behind the Horizon reports' projections for this technological development.

A commercial etextbook market needed to be established in Australia before we could begin to move towards a DIY etextbook environment.

The other thing about me is that, as an editor, I've been trained to question everything.
I like to question assumptions, systems and processes. I want you to question these things as you consider your own projects.
Questioning assumptions and processes is an important part of the innovation process.

Does an etextbook have to be text only? Of course not.
Consider the following questions:
Why is a lecture not a textbook chapter?
Why is a semester's worth of recorded lectures not itself a textbook?
Do we assume that learning only happens when students are reading?
Is watching audiovisual content not sufficient learning?

Our teaching must be effective, efficient and sustainable. Are textbook readings an effective learning activity? Is developing our own textbook content efficient? Is setting a textbook sustainable - especially if it's commercially produced and updated each year?


Is the production of a whole lot of words in essay (or other) format an effective way to demonstrate learning?

(Excerpt from p. 14 of Horizon report on higher education 2014)

Making and creating to demonstrate understanding and learning has been highlighted as an upcoming trend in higher education, as an assessment innovation. I highly recommend a reading of this section of the report.

Some Radical Learning Project proposals focus on students as creators and contributors to learning materials. There is much to explore in the peer learning sphere.

Screen shot taken by Ruth Jelley, CC Attribution licence

The publishing industry has been debating formats since ebooks became a commercial commodity. Formats are still strongly tied to - and determined by - devices. The sort of content that we want to engage with in higher education is complex and not always easily handled by standard publishing formats.

A book industry source stated that 39% of Australians own a tablet device, and these are predominantly Apple devices. But we do not have any demographic data about tablet ownership, so it's dangerous to make assumptions about the number of our students who may own or have regular access to a tablet device.

We must bear on mind that if we produce content in a specific format for a particular device, it is time-consuming (read: expensive) to reverse-engineer to fit other formats. The best method will be to develop in platform-agnostic formats first and then push that out to device-specific formats. Updates can be made to the agnostic master file and the push-out process repeated easily.

Even when course materials are made available for free in electronic format, some students still prefer a print copy (hint: it's not just mature-age students). We either need to accept this reality (how many of us prefer to read intellectual materials on paper rather than on screen?) and accommodate it, or work out how to prepare "print preferred" students to engage deeply in an electronic environment.

Other workshops have probably discussed equity of access to mobile devices, but it's an important enough issue for La Trobe to raise it again. An important part of envisioning a future revolving around tablet devices is engineering a system for equitable access to devices for all students, especially the more disadvantaged students. See this not merely as a hurdle but as an exciting opportunity to find a workable solution to the challenge.

Producing electronic resources is by no means cheap; it still requires human time. But the benefits of doing so are great: greater control over content; the ability to keep it up-to-date easily; the ability to provide it to students for little or no cost, which improves student engagement and retention - a great incentive in itself.

Some of the images used in this presentation carry a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence, meaning that I must in return licence this presentation the same way.