eBooks / iBooks

Overview

Apple’s iBooks Author has provided a platform for easily creating interactive electronic textbooks. Harvard Professor E.O. Wilson has created a phenomenal example with his biology textbook, Life on Earth.

Academic Technology has been working with a number of courses in the Modern Hebrew Department to move all their materials into an ebook format and combine them with quizzes, audio of native speakers, video and the abilty to take notes.

Goals

This is clearly a huge step forward in an individual's ability to create and distribute multimedia-rich, interactive textbooks. However, we are at the very beginning of understanding best practices. After interviewing the students and reviewing their evaluations, we hope to gain insights into what they found useful as well as what needs aren't being met.

Modern Hebrew

Irit Aharony's modern Hebrew course will be offered in the fall of 2012. The iBook for this course will be a grammar textbook that will take advantage of a number of web-based grammar widgets developed for the course. Hebrew provides an additional challenge because it is written right to left, and Hebrew grammar books include niqqud (diacritic marks representing vowels), which are mostly absent in modern Hebrew orthography, but are extremely useful for language learners.

Medieval Latin

Professor Jan Ziolkowski started using a wiki in his spring term course, Medieval Latin 105. The wiki allowed the students to more easily collaborate around the content of the course, which focused on the Waltharius manuscript. Prof. Ziolkowski wanted to enhance the students' experience by moving the Waltharius text to an iBook and including interactive grammar and metric exercises. This course will allow a comparison of some of the qualities of these two types of tools.

Feedback and Evaluation

At the end of the course, students filled out evaluations and were interviewed by AT members. As a result of the feedback, we upadated the books from term to term and well as provided recommendations for how to best use them in class and out.