Faculty of foreign philology english teaching methodolgy department course paper

Results and Discussion

In this study, questionnaires were distributed to teachers who applied e-book in learning activities. Teachers enrolling in a free and voluntary program were asked to fill in the questionnaire. Among the participants, 55.30% were female (169 males and 209 females); the ⁸teachers (elementary school teachers: 71.9%, secondary school teachers: 28.1%) were from 24 to 58 years old with an average age of 38. The percentage of participants with experience using e-textbooks in teaching was 68.5%, and those without such experience comprised 31.5%. Teacher’s background varied from subjects (e.g., Chinese languages, English, mathematics and other 10 subjects) to grade level (1 to 9). Besides, sometimes they are required to take turns to teach the different subjects and the target students’ grade level. The average of teaching experience is 13.51 years.

Teacher’s views on the requirements of e-textbooks

In the interviews performed during the first stage, the teachers expressed their views regarding their e-textbook requirements:
Teacher 1: “Teachers should choose e-textbooks based on curriculum outlines for use in teaching. E-textbooks should have some functions which echo the curriculum outlines similar to how teachers should teach and consistent with the requirements of the curriculum outline, which are used to prepare lessons following the teaching manuals or guidance, and to provide students with corresponding assignments and quizzes, etc. Thus, in addition to the same contents in traditional textbooks, e-textbooks should provide convenient and more easily integrated multimedia functions”.
Teacher 2: “Basic functions included in e-textbooks for students’ use should provide no answers for students’ assignments, offer supplementary explanations, hyperlinks and favorable settings, while those for teachers’ use (a version that differs from the students’ version) should have supplementary teaching explanations, such as answers for assignments, assessments and other things, and instructional videos integrated in one place”.
Teacher 2: “We still cannot do without approved versions of materials consistent with the textbook review and approval policy. Due to unified assessments and things such as these in approved versions of the materials, such materials fail to meet the students’ individual needs. To cope with individual needs, e-textbooks should have additional supplements”.
Teacher 3: “The school bought some books once, and these were not reviewed and approved versions of the materials, if you teach using such books, what would parents say? … We received disapproval from the parents”.
Teacher 4: “Why do we trust textbooks? They have definitely been reviewed and have met approval standards. Thus, if we make e-textbooks in Taiwan, then their review and approval are a must. In reality, parents attach great value to such things (textbooks)—review and approval will give parents reassurance regarding their children’s use of e-textbooks, but self-prepared ones (teaching materials) are susceptible to the parents’ disapproval”.
Teacher 5: “We should not only add multimedia and hyperlinks to existing textbooks, but also put in teacher-student interactions and overall support of learning records and assessments”.
Taken together, the teachers’ views on the requirements of e-textbooks are summarized as follows: (1) use approved e-textbooks; (2) e-textbooks should have not only textbook contents but also digitalized assessments or teaching materials such as assignments and academic records; (3) e-textbooks should have multimedia presentation functions to help the students learn. We distributed these three perceptions and questionnaires to teachers and performed descriptive statistics after retrieving the questionnaire responses. We found high levels of agreement among the teachers for these three items, with values for “agree” and “strongly agree” ranking above 81.1%, and with all the means higher than 4.12(Cronbach’s alpha (α) = 0.953) (see Table 1). Both the elementary and secondary school teachers surveyed thought that e-textbooks were positively defined as “ones whose compilations follow the teaching objectives, contents, ability indicators and so on in the Grade 1–9 curriculum outlines, that have passed review and approval, and that are equipped with multimedia presentation functions plus digitalized assessments or teaching materials, such as assignments and academic records”. This definition requires conformity with the Grade 1–9 curriculum outlines and approvals, which varies from the definitions in the existing literature (Shepperd et al. 2008; McFall et al. 2006). The teacher thought that content and version of e-textbook could be better if these could be accredited or reviewed by the official. The findings in this study are coincident with the claims found in Chen et al. (2013) study.