If you’ve recently taught an ESL course with a newish textbook, you are probably aware that most textbooks now come with the supplemental online resources. These resources are accessed via a code which is often printed in the jacket of the textbook. Sometimes these codes are automatically calculated in to the price of the textbook, but other times they are optionally presented as “bundles.”

Once when I was teaching a low-intermediate literacy course at a community college, I had an experience with an online textbook supplement that caused major problems in my course and actually for the publishing company as well! In Tennessee, where I used to live, the academic calendar starts quite early — often in late July or early August. So, when I introduced my students to the new edition of NorthStar Reading & Writing, it was actually the first time any teacher in the country had introduced the newest edition of the textbook to a class. This edition had an online supplement and to access it, the students needed to use their access code to create an account. I knew that the technological literacy of my students was probably on the lower level, so I planned about a half hour of class time to meet with the in a lab and walk them through the process of setting up their accounts.

There were 20 students in that class, and only one of me, so at this level, that was already quite a challenge, but I was brave. 🙂 (In retrospect, “brave” may be a euphemism for “ignorant” because I ended up spending three total class periods and hours on the phone with the textbook representative and the tech support team. The problem was that no matter what my students did, their access codes would not work. I kept blaming their low tech lit skills and the publishing company kept insisting that I was using the wrong website. But we were following the exact instructions from the jacket of the book.

Finally, after two weeks of this back and forth, I got an email from the publishing rep, and the subject line was “OMG.” The company had published the wrong URL in the jacket of the newest edition. The access codes were right, but the URL was for the previous edition of the book, and thus the access codes wouldn’t work.

This whole process was very disconcerting for my students, who had spent quite a lot of money on a new edition — new editions always mean that students cannot save money by purchasing a used copy of the book). On top of the financial burden, there was the issue of their absolute terror about all things technology, and this experience unnecessarily raised their affective filter. From that point forward, they were very skeptical of the entire idea of using online materials.

In return for suffering through this, I received a personalized letter from the president of the publishing company and a coupon for a free book, so at least they recognized the great sacrifice that my students and I had made. But still, a book with that level of popularity from one of the top publishing companies in the ESL world should not have such a gaff!

This contributed to my already-established suspicion that publishing companies hire computer “geeks” with little concept of CALL or SLA to develop these supplemental materials. And partially this contributed to my desire to return to university for the PhD. I chose ISU primarily for the focus on technology and CALL, and I hope to effect some change in the field of publishing.

6 thoughts on “Textbooks & Online Supplements”

  1. Kim, back in Turkey, I used NorthStar in my classes for 5 years, with that online supplement. I am surprised that such a big company made that mistake. Although I didn’t have problems like you did with URL, I used to spend a lot of time to take students to the lab and show them how to sign up, log in, and do the rest of the stuff. Since we did a project on screencasting, just after I read your post, I checked YouTube and found some tutorials for MyEnglishLab. Next time, I will make students watch them 🙂

    1. When I was teaching, I never thought about using YouTube tutorials! There are so many things that I’ve learned in just a few months here that I wish I had known while actively teaching ESL learners!

  2. Wow, that’s a true cautionary tale, Kim. One more reason to be wary of ELT publisher and their “wares.”

    I have to say, based on my experience with supplementary online materials, that the publishing company’s don’t even hire very good geeks! The technology they use always seems miles behind what’s happening elsewhere on the web and in mobile app-land in terms of language learning.

  3. It is so sad that the publishers hire geeks that do not have CALL or SLA background.
    I am wondering why they update the whole webpage instead of their access code data base. Keep the URL consistent with previous version is much easier for readers to use the web.

Leave a Reply