Why are teachers so willing to choose e-coursebooks?

The fast pace of technological progress, widespread digitisation and replacement of traditional solutions with more modern ones are the norm in today’s world. The changing reality constitutes a challenge for many industries, including education.

The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly demonstrated the need for comprehensive and innovative teaching methods, allowing for effective education – also in the online form. Such solutions include e-coursebook technology, which enables teachers to work effectively and makes learning easier for students. Importantly, working with e-coursebooks is effective during remote and in-person learning.

The ongoing dynamic changes make it impossible to predict exactly what the teaching system will look like in the future. However, it can already be seen that the share of digital tools and digital forms of educational materials is growing significantly. Teachers are increasingly willing to use modern online tools because they offer a wide range of possibilities while minimising the workload of repetitive, non-creative activities. One excellent example of this is the e-coursebook, which allows them to eliminate automatic activities and fully focus on teaching.

Benefits for teachers

Learning based on e-coursebooks offers many benefits. Their advantages over classic paper textbooks primarily include huge time savings in the preparation of classes and checking tasks and tests, clearly better capabilities for monitoring the student’s progress in the classroom and outside the classroom, and significant facilitations in the manner of conducting classes. And these are not their only strengths. So many benefits are due to the full integration of e-coursebooks with the e-school.eu platform intended for conducting lessons as well as self-education and its key component, i.e. the Virtual Classroom (you can find more information about this tool here). One environment and one technology behind e-coursebooks allow teachers to create graphically consistent and attractive lessons based not on one but many different interactive textbooks published by different publishers. It is difficult to find a similar, comprehensive solution offering such a wide range of possibilities.

Let us, therefore, take a closer look at the e-coursebooks.

BENEFIT 1: Time saving

A teacher’s work is not only time spent on active teaching but also hours devoted to preparing attractive lessons, i.e. selection of additional materials (exercises, texts, recordings, illustrations), engaging quizzes, games or tests. The functionality of e-coursebooks allows for a dramatic reduction of this time because each of them contains a rich set of ready-to-use supplementary materials that have been prepared by renowned publishers. When preparing classes, teachers can freely combine elements of various e-coursebooks, add their own (created in a special panel) materials and quickly create a coherent interactive whole. This work is facilitated by a search engine, enabling quick access to the entire database of materials collected in e-coursebooks of various publishers.  On the other hand, a special space referred to as the “desk”, allows you to save exciting materials for later without having to search for them again.

E-coursebooks also offer automatic test checking, homework and exercises according to the answer key entered by the publishing house. With one click, students get information about their results, analyse their correct and incorrect answers and get acquainted with the right task solutions. The teacher, in turn, has insight into the results of the students’ work and the answers they submit. This is huge facilitation and saving of time, which the teacher doesn’t have to waste on arduous checking of tasks and tests.

BENEFIT 2: Better capabilities for tracking learning progress

Quizzes and tests can be used to monitor learning progress, but tracking students’ work on an ongoing basis gives much better results. The biggest advantage of working with an e-coursebook is the ability to keep track of students’ work on an ongoing basis. The teacher can look at the tasks performed by students in real-time during the lesson or immediately after the completion of individual exercises if they work alone at home. Teachers can react in a timely manner to mistakes made or difficulties encountered in taking up specific batches of material. This has a motivating effect on students – they feel that someone is actually watching over their work.

An additional advantage of working on the e-school.eu platform is the wide range of interactive types of tasks that the teacher can use to test the students’ knowledge. Naturally, these may be classic tests composed of different types of tasks tailored to the needs of a particular group. Still, alongside them, there are such attractive forms as webizzes or crossword puzzles. By solving such interactive tasks, students don’t feel tested all the time, while each teacher still has an insight into the progress of the group and each student individually. They see which topics have already been mastered and which topics need to be repeated, and most importantly, which students they should devote more time to. This definitely facilitates class planning and effective management of the course time.

BENEFIT 3: Facilitation in everyday work

Numerous advantages of teaching based on e-coursebooks include the fact that they can be used virtually anywhere and at any time. All materials are located in the digital cloud, thanks to which they can be accessed from any device: computer, tablet, as well as a smartphone, as the e-coursebook adapts to the size of the display.

As publishers have the ability to continuously update the content of textbooks, teachers are always given access to the latest data and updated information. They do not have to constantly check the changing statistics or supplement the information with new facts. This provides significant time savings and facilitates daily work

The E-coursebook has numerous built-in tools that were designed to make teachers’ work more comfortable. Now, with one click, you can insert selected e-coursebook pages into a lesson and then supplement each lesson at your discretion, with interactive exercises created by yourself or published by other teachers.

E-coursebook has an additional functionality, especially important for language courses –; each student has the opportunity to write down the topics they propose or to signal problems to be discussed as part of the classes. So, the teacher sees a constantly updated list of topics important from the point of view of the course participants or issues requiring additional clarification. This additional interaction allows you to focus on these most important areas.

BENEFIT 4: Simpler and effective student engagement

What distinguishes e-coursebooks from e-books is the high level of interactivity that increases students’ motivation to acquire knowledge. The ability to use many different forms of exercises means that students’ attention remains focused and their interest is maintained. For the teacher, this means less stress related to the need to attract the audience’s attention and more time for the implementation of the material.

Among the tools offered by e-coursebooks, in addition to standard exercises (including crosswords, various versions of gap filling, putting sentences in order, grouping elements, combining illustrations or true-false exercises), there are new options that significantly increase the attractiveness of the lessons and the motivation of students to learn:

• webizzes – allowing for interactive play and introduction of gamification elements;
• self-checking tests and exercises enabling students to track their progress;
• digital version of popular “flashcards”, i.e. an interactive repetition of vocabulary, helping to permanently remember a word or phrase;
• multimedia items.

As you can see, e-coursebooks are an excellent choice for teachers who are looking for non-standard, visually attractive teaching materials. This choice also benefits students, for whom more diverse and engaging material means that the learning process is more fun.

It’s worth noting that the teacher can use all these elements in three modes: during online classes, during in-person work in the classroom and in a hybrid model combining students staying at school and at home (e.g. due to pandemic restrictions). Especially the latter situation has been an enormous challenge for teachers so far – it took a lot of effort and ingenuity to conduct a hybrid lesson efficiently and at the same time maintain students’ attention. Now, the teacher can use the e-coursebook and the Virtual Classroom integrated with it (read more), which greatly facilitates this task. All materials are in one place; the platform has built-in tools for audio/video transmission – there is no need to use external applications. The teacher can control the course of work of students, both those in the classroom and those participating virtually, so that no student feels left out. Collaborative solving of interactive exercises is a variation of the lesson, engages the entire group and attracts attention.

Forecasts for the future

The hybrid teaching system has become permanently embedded in some educational institutions, and it can be expected that the share of online classes will continue to increase. Access to updated materials, their convenience and their multifunctionality make e-coursebooks an ideal tool for conducting classes in both traditional and virtual forms.

Learning in a modern, multimedia version, based on student-friendly materials and adapted to age and capabilities, is more effective and, at the same time, requires less effort on the part of the teacher. Until recently, e-learning classes were employed mainly when teaching foreign languages. Today, it is becoming the norm to use novelties and digital facilities for teachers in virtually every field and stage of education. Using an e-coursebook is simple and intuitive. It can be used by both students and those who have already completed their formal education but still want to acquire knowledge in self-education. In any case, interaction and the lack of monotony are all the more important because the learning process is not tedious and engages the learners’ attention on many levels.

The usefulness of e-coursebooks for teachers can be summarised in three sentences:

1. access to a variety of ready-to-use interactive content;
2. the ability to implement various ideas and create tailor-made lessons based on existing resources, and
3. fast and effective process of preparing classes.

On the one hand, e-coursebooks are a tool facilitating the implementation of professional ambitions and, consequently, bringing satisfaction from work; on the other, they offer time saving, which is so important in today’s world. The use of modern technologies that make life easier becomes pure pleasure.

By investing in this innovative form of scientific aids, the publishing house gains a group of regular customers who willingly use the benefits of modern technology. The dynamic development of digital textbooks on the market –, their increasing diversity and availability, only increases teachers’ involvement in this form of education, and thus their loyalty to the publishing house.