Using CCDMD Textbooks to Best Advantage

Part of the mandate of the Collegial Centre for Educational Materials Development (CCDMD) is to publish textbooks. The CCDMD’s current catalogue boasts 127 titles (in French and English), and all the textbooks published since 2012 are also available in digital format.

From the very beginning, we wanted to go beyond the simple digitalization of a print book. In a quality reference work, there is a lot of text and adding a variety of non-textual components offers added value. The combination offers a unique flavour, but every part of the structure can be a learning object to be used in the classroom. From this perspective, illustrations, photographs, diagrams, charts, maps, formulas and forms play an important role in teaching and learning. Teachers and students use these components or “chunks” in their respective processes, but not necessarily in the way the textbook’s pedagogical designers imagine they will or suggest they should.

That’s why the CCDMD is trying to make the content of our publications even more flexible by “chunking” them. Chunking, for the CCDMD, means making the illustrations, diagrams and other non-text components of a textbook available at will, so the teachers can use them in their own way in their courses.Take the example of a photo showing a dental model from a new textbook produced by the CCDMD, written by Suzanne Turmel and translated by Valentina Baslyk, The Dental Hygienist: A Public Health Perspective. This image would naturally be of interest to people in the dental hygiene techniques program, which is the program the textbook was written for. But it would definitely also be of interest to people studying early childhood education, for example.

Photo of a dental model, taken from a new CCDMD textbook by Suzanne Turmel.

Reproduction of a portrait of King Henry IV of England, taken from a CCDMD textbook by Doug Buchanan.

Another example is a reproduction of a portrait of King Henry IV of England, taken from a CCDMD textbook written by Doug Buchanan, …And One Classical: A Shakespeare Audition Handbook. This would naturally be of interest of people in the professional theatre program, which is the program the textbook was written for. But, it would likely also be of interest to people studying general history, art history or literature, for that matter.

To release these chunks of content from the confines of a textbook specific to a single program and diversify pedagogical integration options, we decided to publish them in web albums. Every new textbook has an eponymous album on the World of Images website. The albums also appear in the CCDMD catalogue and the teaching and learning resource directories (REA) that are gathering metadata.  The viewing and downloading statistics for this material prove that it meets a real need!

The content is referenced to make it easier to find online. The textbook comes to the users where they are! As a publisher of college-level textbooks, the CCDMD has produced a sizable heritage, and our mandate is also to make it accessible in different forms.

A few images from the album for Doug Buchanan textbook… And One Classical: A Shakespeare Audition Handbook.
The files can be downloaded at different resolutions.

The many potential users of these textbooks chunks will have no shortage of ideas on how to use this rich media for their own productions: class notes, presentations, blogs assignments, etc. So please go browse through one of our publication albums :
The Dental Hygienist: A Public Health Perspective or
…And One Classical : A Shakespeare Audition Handbook. One click can open up a world of possibilities!