A new way to get students to read the text

Ask any instructor and she'll tell you that one of the biggest challenges is making sure that students read the textbook. I've tried several approaches to this problem, from begging and pleading (no effect) to requiring students to outline the text (seemingly effective, but very time-consuming). In my flipped class (described elsewhere in this blog) I rely on the in-class activities to force students to engage with the material in the text, and I think this approach works pretty well. However, the jigsaw activities we do in class really only require students to engage with the material their learning groups are responsible for (just a small portion of any chapter), and they get the rest of the material from their peers in the teaching groups. So when my Pearson book rep told me about a new offering for my textbook that would require more student engagement with the text, I was ready to listen.

She told me about a new service called REVEL. REVEL really is a number of related things. First, the REVEL service provides students with an electronic version of the entire text, from pictures, to bold key words, to chapter summaries, everything that appears in the paper version appears in the e-version, plus there are interactive elements like brief activities and videos. The etext is in the cloud and is accessible on most platforms, from PCs to tablets to smartphones. So students can access the etext anywhere they have internet access including over wifi and cell service. Students also get an unbound 3-hole-punch version of the text identical to the traditional bound version. So, in sum, they get the same text they used to get, but now they get it electronically and in paper form, with added electronic features (including narration of the text). This alone might have tempted me to adopt this version, just for the increased access and portability. But there's much more to REVEL.

The most useful aspect of REVEL are the assignments that Pearson has built into the etext. As an instructor I get an account on REVEL that allows me to select from a list of assignments for each chapter in the etext. I can set up a due date for each assignment and REVEL will track each student's performance and progress on the assignments. The assignments themselves range from short quizzes covering small sections of the chapters to shared reflections on the material. The short quizzes can be taken multiple times, although correct answers diminish in value with each attempt. I really like this mastery approach. There are also quizzes that cover the entire chapter. I can select whatever type of assignment to use, covering any part of a chapter or all of it. The semester hasn't started yet so I don't know how well the analytics work, but it looks very helpful from the instructional videos. 

Setting up the assignment on Pearson's REVEL website does take some time and effort, and at this point REVEL doesn't interface with our LMS (Blackboard) so I'll have to manually import the results into the LMS and my gradebook, but that looks relatively painless. But I really like the ability to control when the assignments are available so they track my course schedule.

So the idea is that students are forced to attempt the assignments I selected (I chose the section quizzes, but not the chapter-length quizzes). They can relatively easily jump to the quizzes without reading the associated material, but their performance on those quizzes will likely suffer for it. My hope is that the REVEL assignments will lead to more student engagement with the text (obviously).

Pearson suggests that you make the REVEL assignments worth 15-35% of their final grade, but I decided that they would be worth 40% of the final grade for my class (and 40% from the in-class quizzes, and 20% from a paper assignment).

So, again, if REVEL only provided a more accessible etext, and the online assignments, I would have been very likely to adopt it. But on top of that, the cost of the REVEL package is substantially lower than the traditional bound text. I'm talking $105 for the REVEL package compared to about $240 for the bound text. With the spiraling cost of textbook (and higher education in general), I felt nearly compelled to adopt the REVEL version.

I'm pretty excited about using REVEL in my class. I promise to blog about how well it works during the semester. Stay tuned.