The Future of Science Textbooks

by R. Neil R. Kestner, Louisiana State University

Textbooks in higher education are an endangered species. It is widely reported that only half of the students actually purchase the textbook used in a class. Textbooks have gotten bigger, more expensive, more limiting, more dated, and less useful with time. Students rarely keep the textbook after the course is over; most textbooks are sold back immediately after the final exam, creating a massive used book market. Thus students lose access to most of the content after the course is over.

Science textbooks are also under pressure to change often, for a number of additional reasons. One reason is that there has been a huge growth in the amount of content available and the corresponding need for instructors to "pick and choose" among various topics, simply because not everything can be covered. The textbooks are getting more and more expensive, bigger and bigger, and yet they represent but a fraction of what is or could be used in the classroom. Furthermore, only a fraction of the text is now used, with each professor picking and choosing what parts he/she wants to cover. The typical textbook has been edited to include something for everyone and thus is too massive, while the faculty teaching a particular course ignores most of the material. The result has been that the textbooks have grown in size while every year less of the book's content is taught in any one class. We are clearly facing a dilemma; we cannot continue as we have been proceeding.

With the increased size of the textbook has come increased costs. Those costs continue to rise, and it is now typical for a science textbook (without supplements) to cost about $100 each. Some of this rise is due to the increased use of color and elaborate typography which students now demand. Still, with the realities of today's instruction, they will use less than half of that book even in a year's course. Those high costs have led to another phenomenon, namely the burgeoning used textbook market.

The secondary used book market has become an economic force of its own. Every year students sell back their texts and often at major losses. This effect encourages publishers to produce new versions of a text as often as possible so as to reduce the used book market. That leads to a big turnover of those expensive textbooks. Students no longer keep even those one or two textbooks which will be important in future courses and careers.

Also the typical set of books for any science class no longer includes just the textbook, but also a problem book, solutions manual and study guide and maybe a CD-ROM. Such a combination can weigh ten pounds and be almost impossible to carry around each day. While we don't expect students to carry all the books for every course, it is beginning to look like each student needs a little red wagon to carry their textbooks and supplements around. Clearly, we cannot keep going down this path.

One reason that additional books are available in the course is that the students want extra guides to the textbook and lecture; they want extra sample quizzes to practice and more problems than are included in the book. Faculty members also like to have an additional source of material to assign or use. It is well known that student comprehension improves the longer the "time on task." Those supplements do present this material but they too are limited. A book can present a problem and hide the answer somewhere, but it is hard for a book to tailor material to each student, presenting those with less comprehension further examples of similar problems. Books also have limited ability to provide interactivity. Right now it is very interesting that the CD-ROM which is purchased in addition often contains the entire textbook, along with lots of other course material. That redundancy is a fact of life since many students do not have access to a computer and usually do not carry around an appropriate laptop computer. Also many students are not yet comfortable with the computer presentation. But times are changing.

In addition the textbook is now becoming too limited, too flat, too static. Increasingly the concepts which should be demonstrated in science classes involve time-dependent behavior, three-dimensional views and complex ideas which require extensive use of color or multidimensional representations (including overlays, etc.). Furthermore it is often useful to demonstrate concepts for various values of parameters, some of which are not easily accessible even in demonstrations. Speaking of demonstrations, computer videos can show the students actual experiments without the need for laboratory space; one can even show dangerous reactions. Related to this is modern pedagogy, fueled by the interests and limited attention spans of current students, which stresses the use of interactivity. This is a feature which modern computers can make very accessible but which is hard to incorporate fully into text-only material. The modern classroom is becoming student or learning centered rather than instructor or lecture oriented. Students are getting involved in the instructional process, often deciding how material is presented or exploring various options themselves. The increased role of simulations and colorful multimedia presentations fit hand in hand with this trend, allowing students to experiment with the computer programs and discover various principles on their own.

Since the textbooks for courses have these serious problems, commercial publishers of textbooks are now at a crossroads. They can see the decline of paper texts for many reasons. The course content, technologies and materials available are changing rapidly and yet, the size of most textbooks makes them very expensive and equally hard to update. The textbook does not allow for rapid changes in content and is limited in format. As a result, publishers are trying new procedures. Today many publishers are willing to create unique versions of the text for a particular school if there is enough enrollment to justify the extra expense (and that cost is dropping with newer production methods). It has even been known for them to include parts of several different texts, something they would not consider even a few years ago. This is becoming common for laboratory manuals where faculty can tailor a published manual to their special needs, taking what is available from the publisher as a group of modules to be used in the manner the instructor decides--often deciding to ignore many of those offered. Both McGraw Hill and Prentice Hall, for example, now allow a faculty member to create his own laboratory manual by picking items off a list on their web site, and then bundling in their own material; this is then bound and sent back to the school bookstore for sales.

The new communication technologies are changing how we teach, how students learn. The textbook is becoming but one tool. Most publishers in the sciences and even other areas are exploring the use of CD-ROM and Internet Web sites to supplement their textbooks. They also realize that in the future there may not be a text, so they want alternative publication environments. If the student has the proper computer equipment, the paper book is becoming less relevant or essential. However, at the moment those sites or CD’s are usually treated as supplements to the textbook and the course. CD's include real time molecular modeling, simulations, videos of laboratory experiments, and all sort of aids like trial exams with extensive feedback, problem sets with worked-out answers, alternative readings, links to relevant web sites, interactive calculations, built-in calculators, java applets to allow matching of items on an image with vocabulary, real time experiments using java, even interactive remote operation of instruments. In some products most of the material is on the CD, in other cases most is on the publisher's web site. These web sites can be updated easily and new material added as often as one wants. One chemistry site has links to major newspapers and magazines. If there are major breaking news stories, they can be made available to everyone quickly along with background material on related web sites. There is a lot of experimentation underway (and a lot of money is being spent) to try to discover what works best. There are also efforts by IMS (Instructional Management Systems, a project of Educause and the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, NLII) to standardize all web-presented modules so they can interact with each other and maintain control, copyright and ownership where essential. The bottom line is that textbook publishers know that times are changing, and they are trying to find their role in this new electronic marketplace. They will always have a role, since preparing this material is too expensive for most schools or faculty to prepare in high quality, but the exact nature of what will happen is being explored daily.

In summary, right now we have a very confused situation in which textbooks are the primary source of information in large enrollment courses but are viewed suspiciously by students, faculty and even publishers. Not that books are all bad; they have some unique advantages in that they can be carried and used anywhere. Publishers are experimenting with web sites that can be easily updated and with CD-ROM's containing most or almost all of the material. This multiple source situation will continue for some time, but what material is included where will change as everyone searches for the best solution. This confused state satisfies no one and will only change with a new environment in the universities and among students. Part of that change will be a natural evolution as computers become smaller and more pervasive at the college level. It might also require new equipment.

One View of the Future

Clearly the days of the huge science textbook are limited. But what will be the solution? Clearly the mass of material being used and generated in many science classes requires that the material be stored in electronic form. However it is presented, it must be in color and capable of motion, animation and interactivity. This means we need something like a laptop computer even lighter than current models. We will not be satisfied with something like the eRocket or just a reader which has limited ability to do computations. For science courses, in contrast with humanities courses, the device used will have modules that do calculations and perform mathematical manipulations of various types. This device must also allow the user to interact with the programs.

In any case it is clear that the total weight students will carry will be significantly less than the sum of the weights of books now being carried. This new device will also have an internet connection, maybe even wireless, to allow new materials to be added, updated or completely modified in minutes. Some material for each course will be on a distance server, but much will be downloaded for quicker access. Very likely students will also use the device to upload items, like quizzes they have taken, to a server for grading and storage. Other uses of the device will be to have interactions with the instructor and with the class via either synchronous or asynchronous interactions, be they simple email, threaded discussions, or real time chats with videoconferencing. Clearly in the near future the chats will be verbal and video with the machine translating each comment into text.

Regardless of what media are ultimately used, college faculty will insist on managing and adapting any material to their own desires. That ability must be included in any solution. This will require that faculty members have the ability to change the course content presented on each student's computer. Most likely this will be done by the simple act of modifying items stored on a server, which the students can access and download to their own device.

You can just see a student of the future at registration time taking his device and downloading all of the content needed to begin each course. This could even be done during the first day of class with wireless connections in each classroom.

One aspect of this problem complicates this simple solution. Many students in the past, and even some of our current students, do not like to read and study from computer screens. This issue of human-computer interaction and reading by computer screen needs more study to find the best presentation medium, be it a soft screen capable of being bent like paper or simply some better design of the viewing areas, fonts, and typography. Right now this may be the major issue slowing down the widespread adoption of laptop computers in the schools. It will be interesting to watch whether the new generation of children who have grown up watching computer screens will find electronic presentation of materials less of an issue that those of us in previous generations.

So far in this section we have not mentioned the role of the publishers in the next era. Since the course content materials which the students will use must be of high quality and since that material is expensive to produce, we will need commercial firms to prepare these materials to spread the costs among many users. Publishers will be offering to science instructors "materials"--not necessarily whole books, but maybe just large numbers of modules to choose from. Those instructors will pick and choose from offerings of many publishers. Each one then will package it either on local servers or some publisher's server for the students to access. That is why it is important for such standards as Instructional Management Systems is proposing, so all modules can work well together and all developers can get their proper share of the profits.

When the student of the future wants to review old material there will be web sites to do that. It is possible that some publishers even will have sites (maybe for pay) where students can go back and check over material they might have taken in some class years before. There will be no need for students to keep an old textbook.

These are times of exciting changes in university instruction. We have such a vast and increasing variety of scientific content to use in instruction; we have the electronic networks that can deliver this material virtually anywhere and anytime. However, for the publishers these are scary times since they must totally change their modes of operations, and it is not clear right now what will be the final form of their role. For the hardware manufacturers these are also uncertain times since we are all searching for the new perfect "device" and it is clearly not here yet. But whatever happens with software, hardware or instructional techniques, it is increasingly clear that the science textbook will not exist long in its present form and could vanish except as the last-ditch backup. The future science students' bookshelves will contain CD-ROM's and scratch paper but probably not large numbers of dated, heavy books.