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May 2020 - zyBooks

ECE Resources ECEDHA Source eNewsletter May 2020 zyBooks

May 2020

Partner Product

zyBooks for online, in-person, or hybrid courses, and switching back-and-forth too


Overview: zyBooks were made for both online and in-person classes. zyBooks solve the problem of students reading outside class, replacing textbooks by interactive online content that engages. zyBooks integrate auto-graded homework problems throughout. An instructor's role is elevated to adding value -- answering questions, doing examples, facilitating group work -- whether online or in-person. Hundreds of instructors switched to zyBooks due to COVID-19, joining the thousands already teaching with zyBooks in-person or online. This article introduces zyBooks to the ECE community for classes that are online, in-person, hybrid, or that may change mid-semester.

 

What are zyBooks

zyBooks were developed starting in 2012 by a group of professors who wanted to utilize the web for learning CS and engineering topics outside of class in a better way than textbooks or video lectures. They created new learning content natively for the web, taking advantage of the web's dynamic nature, teaching via:

  • Animations of key concepts rather than static figures. Animations allow figures to be unveiled step-by-step, allow parts of figures to be related via motion, and allow time-based concepts (like a program executing) to be shown dynamically. If a figure is worth a thousand words, an animation is worth five thousand.


  • Interactive learning questions (multiple choice, short answer, matching, and more) to cover details of topics, always with explanations of right and wrong answers. Such questions replace pages of text with a more engaging interactive experience -- like replacing a lecture with a dialogue.


  • Naturally less-text since much learning occurs through the animations and learning questions. 


  • Homework problems, auto-graded with immediate feedback and integrated throughout the learning content, so students can easily refer back and have a seamless learning experience.



zyBooks record all activity completion, for which instructors can give students points, thus solving the long-standing problem of getting students to read outside class.



Students now learn the basics of a course on their own,​elevating the instructors role to one of adding value for students beyond lecturing on the basics, such as doing examples, answering questions, and facilitating group activities.


Furthermore, the reading and homework is auto-graded, freeing instructors and teaching assistants to spend even more time interacting with students, improving their courses, or performing analyses.

 

Improved Learning with zyBooks

Both in-person and online classes struggle with student learning outside of class time, but the problem was especially acute for online classes, which traditionally have high dropout rates, low engagement, and poor grades, especially hurting initially weaker students.


But with zyBooks' highly-engaging interactive content, the problem is mostly solved. Instructors report that students now do the reading, coming to class more prepared. Students report that they are learning "at an amazing pace" (real words from a student) and ask us for access to more zyBooks even in courses that require a different textbook. Analyses show that students voluntarily spend time inside a zyBook and that they interact earnestly with the activities. Numerous publications show that student performance improves when switching from a textbook to a zyBooks, and that students attribute their success in course largely to the zyBook.



In-person, online, hybrid, and switching

From day one, zyBooks were designed with both in-person and online classes in mind, and were used in both kinds of classes since being first introduced in 2012. In fact, the company's co-founder, who authored the first zyBook, introduced and taught an online course using that first zyBook in 2012 and has continued to do so ever since. Several zyBooks were written at the request of the largest online universities in the country, and over half of the largest online universities in the U.S. today use zyBooks for their online courses. For many of those, the zyBook is the main part of the course -- teachers primarily answer questions for the fraction of students that raise them. For others, the zyBook complements active, often synchronous, online teaching by an instructor.

With the COVID-19 situation, universities must now face the reality that summer and possibly fall semester and beyond may be online. Even if a university decides to have in-person classes, many likely will still allow students to take any particular class online -- a different kind of "hybrid" where some students are in-person and some are online. And, universities teaching in-person classes may have to be prepared to switch to online quickly in the case of local (or national) outbreak of the disease again.


With zyBooks, switching between in-person, online, and hybrid (the traditional hybrid or the new hybrid) is easy. For example, the co-founder's school, the University of California, Riverside, has been teaching one 100-student section of CS1 online every quarter since 2012, to complement the other 2-4 in-person sections. The in-person and online sections are run nearly identically, using the same zyBook across all sections, which handles nearly all core aspects of the class -- readings, homeworks, and labs, all auto-graded. When COVID-19 happened, the switch to online was trivial.​The instructors simply switched all sections to the online version, which simply meant lectures, labs, and office hours met on Zoom instead of in a physical room.


Because zyBooks are so well suited for both online and in-person classes, hundreds of schools quickly switched to zyBooks in March and April 2020 due to the switch to online instruction caused by

COVID-19, joining the existing 1000+ courses and instructors already using zyBooks for both in-person and online courses.

We invite you to have your faculty consider us as well. We cover much of Computer Science / Computer Engineering (especially freshmen/sophomore classes), plus several introductory engineering courses, along with math, statistics, and more. With our acquisition by WIley in 2019, our growth is accelerating. We served nearly 250,000 students last year, and look forward to serving yours -- online, in-person, or any which way.

 

https://www.zybooks.com/catalog/

 2-minute demo video

Email: sales@zybooks.com