E-textbook with lecturer-created quiz capabilities

Abstract

The e-book industry has been growing very fast for the last several years, and the e-book sales at Amazon.com already surpassed the printed books at the end of 2010. In the near future, the printed textbooks in K-12 and in higher education will be replaced by the e-textbooks that support multimedia and user interaction. Furthermore, the future e-textbooks will support user interactive quizzes and instant feedbacks on the quizzes for students’ better learning and lecturers’ better teaching. Quizzes and feedback in classes are very common and helpful to check students’ understanding and to correct their misunderstanding. However, the current e-textbooks support only limited capabilities for quizzes and feedback. For example, they do not support interactive quizzes, instant feedbacks, statistics for students’ understanding, or methods for lecturers to make their quizzes in the e-textbooks. In this paper, we propose an e-textbook system that supports interactive quizzes, instant feedback, and quiz-maker, which allows lecturers to make their own quizzes at schools after deploying e-textbooks. Using this e-textbook system, lecturers can make quizzes at any pages in the e-textbooks, and students are able to check their understanding efficiently with instant feedback while reading the books. We also introduce our prototype system, which is implemented utilizing HTML5. The prototype system has advantages such as device independence, ease to implement and low cost.