Online interactive textbooks: creating a book and using it with your students is easier than you think - we'll prove it!
Creators: name: Lanzafame, Robert
name: van Woudenberg, Tom
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: Presentation at SURF Onderwijsdagen 2024

Presentation: November 11, 2024 14:25–14:50, Tango 2 

Conference: November 12-13, 2024, Den Haag

Link to presentation on conference website (text copied below): pretalx.surf.nl/surf-onderwijsdagen-2024/talk/WMFN87/

Useful Links:



TeachBooks Website: teachbooks.tudelft.nl

TeachBooks Manual: teachbooks.tudelft.nl/manual

A video demonstrating how to build a book and edit it online: youtu.be/nOpzEnMtta4


 

Abstract and Description



As modern teaching materials include an increasingly diverse array of digital formats, it becomes essential for teachers to easily and effectively share material with students online. We will introduce you to TeachBooks (our own TU Delft flavor of Jupyter Books), and how it can be an essential tool for collaborative and effective teaching. This presentation will introduce our community and challenge you to join. Whether you're a decision maker, programmer or (future) book author, anyone can contribute to an online book (really---all you need to be able to do is use a keyboard). Getting started with a template book for all your students and colleagues to see and interact with online takes only 10 clicks!






Starting from the need to share educational materials in various forms with students, we created the TeachBooks platform for teachers and student assistants to collaborate and share interactive textbooks. With many open-source tools available, over twenty books published online and more than a thousand students from multiple universities interacting with the books, we've made a substantial impact. Nevertheless, we're eager to grow and share our initiative with you!

We're relying solely on open-source tools and platforms, which allows anyone to start making or editing online books with no commercial licenses or installation required. If you require a login for your readers on a private server, some additional steps are required. However, why would you hide your excellent work? Open-access licensing of books gives you and fellow educators the possibility to easily take from and contribute back to the community.

We draw on recent experience making student-activating textbooks, including programming applications. Our philosophy is to make it possible, practical and fun for all teachers, regardless of experience, and we set up TeachBooks to build a community of expertise. So, whether you or your teaching team is unfamiliar and lost in the nerdy world of interactive books, or whether you're an expert having created your own library of books with custom features: share and collaborate with the biggest and most effective teaching team you were ever part of!

Making educational materials is interesting, but the real fun starts when the students interact with it as well. Online interactive textbooks allow you to adapt to students' comments and wishes on the go, leading to outstanding student reviews:- I have difficulty with reading textbooks that only include written words. The TeachBook provided a lot of interactive visuals that you don't get with a traditional textbook.- I can use the online textbook to run the code online and adjust the parameters, which can give me a more intuitive feeling of the code.- The online textbook is really well structured. Many courses at the TU are difficult not because of the content, but because of the way the teachers set up the Brightspace page.- Sometimes when I learn something from other courses that involves coding, I don't try it myself because it's too much work to get started. With the TeachBook I can immediately test things using the interactive python button on the webpage.- I could appreciate the quiz questions in some chapters because it was an effective way to see if I understood the material.- I really like the book, it is easy to access and well-structured.

Although we provide a few software tools that builds on the Jupyter Book platform, the real purpose of TeachBooks is to facilitate collaboration and help fellow teachers climb the learning curve more quickly than they could on their own. Our presentation will demonstrate how we have used the books effectively in our courses at TU Delft, with students and fellow teachers, as well as how we've incorporated and developed innovative features. For example, Python computation in your TeachBook (100% client-side; no software installation necessary).

If you'd like to have a sneak preview of what we've to offer, visit our website: https://teachbooks.tudelft.nl/.