The e-book as a pedagogical resource

Abstract

This roundtable proposes to present and discuss a project about the e-book as a pedagogical resource. The project will run from Spring 2013 until December 2013 and is a collaboration project between Center for Educational Development (CED), Lund University, and Lund University Libraries (LUB). It will be part of a larger collaboration project involving the universities in Southern Sweden.

New possibilities in the digital learning environments

The importance of digital texts is growing. A rapidly increasing number of e-books are made available by publishers and the large majority of scientific journals are published in fulltext. There are many advantages with digital texts:

• They are immediately available independently of time and space, in computers and mobile devices
• They are searchable
• Created in a correct format they are available also for people with reading difficulties
• An e-book can be integrated with othjer meda, such as sound clips, video clips etc
• They are relatively easy to revise and update

Many teachers at Lund University produce study material for their courses, such as course packs, tutorials, instructions and other types of texts. This material is distributed to the students in either print or digital format. The digital formats are mainly pdf-files and word-files. It is important to give the teachers access also to more advanced tools for producing course literature in digital form. Most interesting are tools making it possible to integrate other media (i.e. video and sound clips) with text.

A toolbox for production of course material in digital form

The project will explore the possibilities to facilitate the production of e-books at Lund University. It will consist of an inventory of the teachers' requirements and expectations, an inventory of the production process including pilot studies of e-book production and an inventory of the need for support and training for teachers producing e-books. It will result in a toolbox for production of e-materials and for the use of Creative Commons licenses.

Roundtable

In August the first part, the inventory of Lund University teachers' requirements and expectations will be finished. A survey study at Blekinge Technical University and a focus group study at Kristianstad University on the same issues will also be finished. The roundtable will discuss and problematize the findings.

After a short presentation the participants will discuss in smaller groups, and in the end the group discussions will be summed up in plenum. The focus will be on university teachers' view and willingness to produce e-materials and the participants will be invited to share their experiences and reflections. The summing up will be documented and distributed to all participants.