E-MATE developed to help teachers create e-books

Mike Qaissaunee, chair of the engineering and technology department at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey, is using a National Science Foundation grant to create a new model for e-book creation. Campus Technology reports today that Qaissaunee’s E-MATE, or “E-books and Mobile Apps for Technician Education” project aims to give teachers the tools to create interactive e-books as well as the resources and training materials to master the process. iBooks Author is free and offers a range of Apple-friendly templates, and an export option to interactive PDFs.

Digital Textbooks

Building a Blueprint for Better E-Books

An NSF-funded project at Brookdale Community College is helping faculty create interactive digital textbooks.

Whenever students at Brookdale Community College have free time, they typically engage with their mobile devices, according to Mike Qaissaunee, chair of the Engineering and Technology department at the Lincroft, NJ, institution. That observation led him to wonder if he could create academic content and deliver it directly to students' mobile devices. Not the static content they're used to, but interactive content that would lure them into using their devices for academics.

"Any free time they had, like waiting in line for a bus or in the cafeteria waiting in line to get some food — we could capture those moments and engage them with content," said Qaissaunee.

Qaissaunee wrote a grant and a year later the National Science Foundation funded his E-MATE project, which aimed to provide professors with a blueprint to create interactive e-books. "We give them resources and training materials to learn how to use certain tools to develop their interactive content," said Qaissaunee. "[We wanted to] learn how to build interactive content and learn best practices in doing this."

The E-MATE team partnered with the National Center for Optics and Photonics Education (OP-TEC) and the National Center for Supply Chain Technology Education, both of which supplied content suited to Brookdale's Engineering and Technology courses. The team turned that content into three e-books: Fundamentals of Light and Lasers, Introduction to the Automated Warehouse and Essential Mathematics for Engineering Technicians. During the process, Qaissaunee and his team identified and documented best practices for creating e-books, which they're eager to share with professors at Brookdale and beyond.

More Info The E-MATE Web site offers additional resources for planning and building interactive e-books: e-mate-bcc.org/getting-started.

Building the Tool Kit

E-MATE (E-books and Mobile Apps for Technician Education) is an approach in which professors adopt various tools to create customized e-books specific to their courses. "We tried to identify [tools] that [professors] already have or that they can get fairly easily — and those that have fairly flat learning curves," said Kelly Parr, E-MATE team member.

One of those tools is iBooks Author, a free download from Apple. This app allows anyone to create textbooks, using a variety of templates to organize content. "It's such a great [tool], why reinvent the wheel?" asked Parr. Once complete, e-books are available for download by students using Apple devices.

Professors can make their e-books more engaging by using widgets to embed interactive content. For example, students can view videos and animations or play games to gain additional knowledge. In Brookdale's Fundamentals of Light and Lasers e-book, a passage on light refraction includes a brief animation to help students gain an understanding of the concept. In addition, the end of each chapter features videos on lab experiments.

Access Across Platforms

Not all students use Apple devices. To accommodate those who don't, the E-MATE team teaches professors to create e-books that are available on all platforms. Professors can still create their e-books using iBooks Author, but then export them as interactive PDFs and use third-party software, like BookWidgets or Tumult Hype, to embed their animations and videos.