How to design a textbook undergrads will actually read?

Neurology of Speech, Language and Hearing by Sarah Key-DeLyria

Development of an Interactive e-textbook designed to engage undergraduates

Published by Great River Learning, (c) 2018

Roles: Author, Lead Researcher, Content Expert, and Activity Designer

Skills: Competitor research, User flow, User interviews, Written communication, Universal Design for Learning, Interpersonal skills, Science communication to non-scientific audiences

Project Summary: Great River Learning approached me in 2017 about collaborating on an interactive neurology textbook on their web platform designed for undergraduates in speech and hearing sciences. At the time, my undergraduates told me that they rarely, if ever, read their textbooks. This included, they told me sheepishly, reading for my classes. (Me, not shocked at all.) I remember thinking to myself, "Why are we assigning these textbooks anyway?"

The goal of the project was to creatively engage students in learning so that not only would they read their textbook, they would actually want to read their textbook. How to do this with something as dry as brain anatomy and physiology?

The textbook was implemented in the Neurology of Speech and Hearing course at Portland State University beginning in 2018 resulting in improved student learning outcomes and learning satisfaction.

A Case Study: Product Development of a Neurology Textbook

The Challenge: How to increase engagement with a neuroanatomy and physiology textbook? How to balance how students preferred to engage with content with professional expectations for their learning?

‍The Timeline: 1 year (2017-2018)

Stakeholders: Great River Learning liaison and designers, Current and former students (end users), other faculty instructors of neurology or similar courses, other faculty that relied on neurology learning as a pre-requisite to their courses.

Research questions: What is the current user flow and where is engagement disrupted? What would be a better user flow?

Key Performance Indicators: Behavioral (Time on task, task success rate, course grade, related course grades), Attitudinal (Satisfaction via course reviews)

‍I interviewed students about when they did and didn't read their textbooks and why. I wanted to understand the different types of students and what a textbook could do to improve the learning of all students. What courses did they do their reading for? Which courses did they skip? Did they use outside (*gasp*) non-professor approved readings for their learning?

I also talked to many faculty about what they wanted to students to know about the brain and how they used brain learning in their courses.

I had to figure out how the student and faculty perspective could both be honored.

Focusing on the students, there were some key themes that I pulled from these conversations: 

1. Students spend more time on readings that are used directly in the course, not just required and never mentioned again.
2. Students are busy. Some work full time, many are parents, some have disabilities that limit their reading time. They sometimes have to read in very short segments, as short as 5-10 minutes.
3. Students love to learn cool things! They aren't motivated by scientific pontification (most of the time... unless it's funny). They're more motivated when the content is relatable.
4. Students like to know what information is the most important and they want fun ways to learn those key themes.

From the professor persective, faculty wanted a low effort way to know that students had engaged with the material. This meant demonstrating they understood vocabulary or had thought deeply about complex topics.

Solutions!

The faculty and student perspectives combined defined the solution space. Using the e-textbook platform, we could provide checkpoints that would meet the student need to understand what information was really crucial and to practice that information and would also meet the faculty need to know students had engaged with that key info.

It was a lot of fun designing interactive tasks sprinkled throughout each chapter and collaborating with the team at Great River Learning to create usable components. We also made sure to connect the content to the reader as often as possible through these activities, self-reflection prompts, and 'humanizing' the anatomy through story-telling.

After launch in 2018, I continued to interview students, but I also was able to observe more students interacting directly with the textbook platform. This allowed me to continue to identify pain points and areas for growth. I also interviewed other instructors about how easy or difficult they found the use of the text in their classes.

Results

The textbook was launched in 2018 and was well received by students. Students read through each chapter in the textbook, tracked by their interaction with the embedded tasks, and they reported feeling more satisfied with the course overall than in previous years. In fact, implementing the textbook resulted in my receiving the John Eliot Allen Outstanding Teaching Award that same year! It's not often that a project results in literally being crowned. Of course, students also had a lot of constructive criticism, which I have been lucky enough to be able to continue to problem solve about with the great team at Great River Learning.