Most of my digital media experience in the educational publishing industry has been limited to CDs - and these have always been supplementary products rather than standalone-saleable items.
Although some of these CDs have been for student use, taking the form of podcasts that give practical examples to the theory the textbook contains, the majority of the CDs created have been solely for the instructor's use.
A typical instructor's CD would contain PowerPoint slides (for lectures and tutorials), an Instructor's manual (a guide on material to cover in lectures and tutorials), a Solutions manual (answers to all the questions in the textbook), ExamView testbank files (a database of hundreds of different types of questions formulated from the textbook that the instructor can use for assessment purposes), student quizzes (for homework and tests) and all the low res images contained in the textbook (for instructors to use however they wish).
Over the past year, we've abandoned the use of CDs - all content that was originally on CD is now uploaded onto our (now very stable) website instead. As each book has an automatic companion website dedicated to it, the process is a simple matter of uploading supplementary content for the textbook on to the companion website shell, then going live.
Some of our blockbuster books have more supplementary features and require something snazzier than the bog-standard companion site. In these cases our multimedia team builds individual websites from the ground up. Everything is password protected and bound up with the sale of the textbook, or adoption by a tertiary educator, so this link to MKGT will only provide you with limited access.
As well as acting as a central depository for instructors (and sales reps) the use of the internet as a platform for providing additional product has enabled the growth of numerous additional supplementary products for students. These include material such as: flashcards, crossword puzzles, quizzes (multiple choice, true/false, short answer, fill in the blank, etc), glossaries (with audio), weblinks, internet exercises and so on. In fact, one of my books, Principles of Macroeconomics in New Zealand 2e, has three additional chapters, only available online.
Currently, our US colleagues are promoting iChapters for products with electronic formats, which includes ebooks, individual chapters, audio and video. We'll be moving in to this iChapter market next year.
I wish I can live again, and be a beneficiary of digital media education system, It will be so much fun! but it can not be existed alone. the more aspects in our lives are engaged in digital technology, the more convenient it could be.
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean, Lucy. I get a little jealous of the young students of the day going through primary and secondary school with a mass of electronic devices to aid their study. I still remember using the whopping big floppy disks... For my work life, it is infinitely more convenient to work electronically - we no longer print page proofs - everything is electronic (gone are the old proofreading marks in favour of PDF-mark ups). Instead of packaging everything up and sending it to authors, freelancers, typesetters and printers, it's a 20-second process of emailing or ftping the files... so much quicker.
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