Abstract
In the world of print, textbooks were the most important tools for dictating what and how student learn in schools. The introduction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), however, gave rise to eTextbooks – a multi-modal, hardware mediated, and connectable, curriculum material. Indeed, the emergence of eTextbook creates fascinating opportunities for teaching and learning, but at the same time, it poses new challenges for both educational practices and policy making by revolutionizing the traditional pedagogical practices, classroom culture and the textbook publishing industry. These new challenges require rethinking and reexamining the appropriateness of the institutional and legal norms which govern the use and authorship of textbooks. This paper identifies the new challenges introduced by eTextbooks, and offers some insights on the policy and legal implications.
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- 1.
This shift from selling commodities (books, records, CDs, DVDs) to services takes place in other sectors too, such as in music (e.g., Spotify) and movies (e.g., Netflix and YouTube).
- 2.
Moodle, for example, is a popular open source LMS that can be used, inter alia, for task assignments, quizzes, content delivery, etc. The system contains detailed logs of user actions available through teacher or administrator user interfaces. Moodle is capable of logging user information and access time and view and upload actions, information about user submission, start and end time, order of questions, question time, and correctness.
- 3.
Growing student data-related concerns have garnered attention from US legislators on alert who passed laws to protect student privacy from the potential harm that student data use may cause. By October 2015, 46 states had introduced 186 bills addressing use of student data, of which 28, in 15 states, became law. Several federal bills are currently pending as well. Many of these bills focus on who can access student information and mandate that private entities may only use student data for educational purposes. They often stipulate substantive restrictions on the use of student data for creating advertising profiles and for marketing purposes. A considerable number of these rules focus on providing more opportunities for notice and choice for parents to consent to particular uses or collection. Indeed, some of the key challenges posed by the media transformation are student privacy, the need to obtain consent (of either the students or their parents) for its invasion and mandatory respect for their (potentially diverse) individual preferences regarding use thereof (see Data Quality Campaign, 2015).
- 4.
In 2014, Google admitted that it mines student data from its Google Apps for Education for targeted advertising purposes.
- 5.
In a complaint filed in December 2015 with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) claimed that Google was collecting data about students while they were signed into their school-based Google accounts.
- 6.
Privacy, according to Nissenbaum, is “a function of several variables, including the nature of the situation or context; the nature of information in relation to that context; the roles of agents receiving information, their relationships to information subjects; on what terms the information is shared by the subject and the terms of further dissemination.”
- 7.
Surveillance may affect the virtues of reading adversely. Reading a novel, for example, involves intimate interaction, wherein readers are asked to rely on their own cognitive insights and emotional experiences to make sense of the text. Readers are given the opportunity to engage in intimate dialogue through the text. Consequently, the ability to read in private could be important for constituting one’s identity and for developing empathy toward others. These processes are essential to the development of an empowered and accountable citizenry.
- 8.
Richards offers a normative theory of intellectual privacy that begins with freedom of thought and radiates outward to justify protection for spatial privacy, the right to read, and the confidentiality of communications.
- 9.
“Nudging,” according to Thaler and Sunstein, is “any aspect of choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.”
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Carmel, Y.H., Olsher, S., Elkin-Koren, N., Yerushalmy, M. (2019). eTextbooks: Challenges to Pedagogy, Law, and Policy. In: Kali, Y., Baram-Tsabari, A., Schejter, A.M. (eds) Learning In a Networked Society. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Series, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14610-8_10
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