Twenty years ago when I did my CTEFLA the first thing we learnt to do was cut and paste; fast forward to the present day and teachers are still working away with scissors and a glue stick. We may use all kinds of technology in and outside the classroom, but nothing seems to have replaced scissors and glue. Will it ever ... ? Please say yes :-)

Pete

Ah Nik!

I remember sitting in an IATEFL conference in Dublin in (I think) 2000 at a meeting / discussion of MATSDA the materials development people in which they had a similar discussion. And I think it also ties in with other discussions in other industries: the death of the book, the death of the newspaper, etc.

There's a natural tendency, I think, for certain technologies to be overtaken by others (not necessarily for very logical reasons) - the better quality Betamax was beaten by VHS, nobody remembers cassette tapes anymore (well, some probably do...) and CD music sales have plummeted.

However, book publishing doesn't seem to be in serious decline yet (despite recent articles from publisher agents, etc. - Jeremy Harmer twittered one such article last week, but I can't lay my hands on the reference right now), and most of us (I imagine) still like books for lots of reasons - they don't explode when you drop them in the bath, they're quicker and easier than booting up a computer, etc. [ read Stephen Fry on technology, twitter and books (triple whammy!) here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7926509.stm ].

The question for me is what do coursebooks bring to our profession? Well, on the one hand you could say they bring some structure to a course of study, they fulfill the role of security blanket that our learners have been weaned on, they provide 'novice' teachers with a clear course of action and some (often) good quality material...

But then again, they often provide a stilted one-person view of the world and of learning, and often that view is from someone who hasn't actually taught in a real classroom for quite some time. They retread the same tired old themes (Oh great, a unit on the environment!) year after year, book after book - and, most importantly, they are often so generic as to be of no real use to anyone.

I think teachers will probably still be using coursebooks in ten years' time - the question is, perhaps, *should* they be using them? My feeling is that having a coursebook around is not necessarily a bad thing for when you need some materials fast, for when you want those exercises for homework from the 'activity' book, etc., but if you want to teach truly engaging, culturally meaningful and relevant classes then you should be preparing your own.

10 years ago that would have been impossible for most people - it would have taken far too long to gather things together and prepare the classes, but as more and more people get access to the outside world online this ceases to be an issue and any teacher worth their salt (and with access to the Net) should be able to prepare materials which are far more engaging, relevant and useful to *their own* learners than any writer of generic coursebooks will ever be able to do, I reckon.

Nik's query regarding the future for the 'course book' prompts me to make some observations.

In India where I teach a course book is all that teachers are happy to use.A course book gives them ready to use materials, ideas and instructions. Only few try to go beyond it to use materials from other sources, and a few prepare materials for use in their classrooms. I am not trying to say that the course book is increasingly becoming useful/redundant or that learning takes place with /without a coursebook.

However, there is no harm in trying to exploit new means of delivering materials other than the course book. But in that case the teachers need to be creative, professionally trained and dedicated. I believe in India and in other parts of the world a course book will remain in use for many years to come. On a personal note, I feel stifled to teach by using a course book as it restricts me from taking care of the varied requirements of my learners who are inhibited from learning differntly because of their obsession to excel in board/college/university examinations.I also feel that technology enabled learning has the potential to offer an attractive alternative.

Best wishes

Kalyan Chattopadhyay

www.theenglishlive.com/forum

www.theenglishlive.com/courses

I don't think coursebook will die soon. Even if they are replaced by technology (computers, Internet, etc) in industrial countries they will be shipped to less fortunate countries who cannot afford technology (slightly cynical, I know ;) )

I can imagine that there will be more and more publishers who offer material online which is easy to keep up-to-date and easy to download and print out or even use directly on students' laptops or IWBs if they have that technology. Such services could even allow teachers to select from alternatives. I am thinking of a lesson about celebrities. Instead of the coursebook writers selecting them, teachers could be offered a selection of pictures of celebrities from different countries which are then automatically placed on the page. The same when the topic is travelling, sports, etc. So, that teachers could at least make the lessons a bit more culturally appropriate depending on which country they are. With today's technology this should be possible.

I could also imagine printing coursebooks on demand with the choices that teachers have made on the website because what is at least as worse as generic outdated coursebook units is cut-and-paste worksheets copied in black and white.

Hi everyone

working with young learners in the French state system, the text book  has a long and happy life ahead. We are talking big money here  - for example in our school of 800 pupils, each child has 1 text book (18 euro paid for by school ) and one workbook 7 euro, paid for by parents.

Each text book is changed by the school every 4 years and every  year a new workbook is bought by the parents. If you multiply this by the number of pupils in France - there are some very good reasons why text books  are here for a while longer !

After my cynical rant (!) some text books for YL can be very good and it can be a life saver when you're in a hurry  - but my pupils always prefer to "go outside", even if it's something simple such as finding  pictures of their favourite stars on the computer (instead of Madonna and Prince William who have life tenancies in French text books...)

just my two cents worth

Gavin you are right in pointing out that the course book writers are instructed sometimes to shun reality. Still we can collaborate to prepare a better course book. As I think not many learners are blessed with creative teachers of languages they learn, we cannot afford to have no coursebook. We cannot leave our learners to the whims of the less proficient teachers of languages who may design courses, materials for their learners. We have to face this reality also that there are few creative and proficient teachers of langauge who can do this. At the same time we cannot shrug off the responsibility to prepare the learners for life outside the classroom. Can't we collaborate to prepare coursebook to prepare our learners for such life? Can't we mobilise our professional community through bodies like IATEFL to spearhead a movement for a 'really different' coursebook? If not then what's the conference meant for?

Kalyan Chattopadhyay

There are two issues here. Coursebooks tend to be pretty bland. Publishers seem to feel that, as they are dealing with a global market, they need to avoid topics that might be controversial or difficult in order to produce materials which appeal as widely as possible. Unfortunately this means that they appeal to precisely no-one, since they need to rehash the same "safe" topics over and over again - and even those tired topics have to be covered in ways that are equally unchallenging (the ever present units on the environment never really seem to get to grips with the root causes of climate change). Inevitably coursebooks are grey - we are going to get Steeleye Span rather than Nine Inch Nails.

The other issue is flexibility; most coursebooks are pretty rigid and unyielding. They begin with unit 1 and grind on to unit 10 or 20 (I wonder what the longest coursebook ever was). They may even be part of series that takes the learner all the way from start to finish. As I mentioned in another posting, teachers who use coursebooks learn to get busy with the scissors and glue. Why? They need to adapt materials to the needs to their students (and to releive the potential boredom of using the same materials in the same way class after class after class). A teacher may have a couple of drummers in their class so, perhaps, the article on Nigel Pegrum can stay, but they do want to change the focus of the lesson and the way those materials are used. Coursebooks just don't seem to want to make this easy.

At the moment, coursebooks usually take a reading text and prescribe a method to exploit it - here are some images, some pre-reading tasks, comprehension, vocabulary, post-reading etc ... as if there is but a single way to use a text. What I would like to see is a teacher friendly coursebook that offers a default route through the materials but also understands that materials need to be adaptable - a book that gives me a choice.

One very simple step towards this would be for a coursebook to include a digital version all the texts and images used in the book. Now I can get those pictures up on my IWB without any difficulty; I can use that text in a Hot Potatoes exercise for a spot of vocabulary revision; I can use a vocabulary profiler to see which words are on the AWL; I CAN ...

Sure, there are some difficult copyright implications here - but I think this would sell more books not less. I would be far more likely to use a coursebook that acknowledged what I actually do as a teacher.

Personally I would like to see an open source approach to ELT publishing, but that's a whole other thing ...

Pete

Are Textbooks Still Relevant in a Web 2.0 World? - Article by Jane Petering.

This article on CMS Wire... Flat World Knowledge Turns Textbook Industry Upside Down... suggests that textbook publishers have open-source competition to contend with.

However, I am far more interested in how we can move beyond the textbook (open source or otherwise).  I find Dogme ELT a real inspiration in considering how to use web 2.0 tools in language learning.  

There is one other issue that is problematic in a digital world for coursebook. Everything put into a coursebook for sale, whether the final product is paper-based, digital or some combination of the two, must be either created by the publisher, be something that is in the public domain or they have to pay someone for the right to use the copyrighted materials.  For us teachers, we can use things in copyleft or creative commons (and theres a lot out there with a LOT more coming). For copyrighted stuff, we can simply tell students to go to the website or project the website in class.

Of course none of us uses copyrighted stuff illegally! *looking innocent*

this is the reason that a lot of coursebook stuff is irrelevant. Not only is it bland or watered-down to try to appeal to everybody... they simply cannot afford copyright fees for more relevant stuff. For example in Attitude 5, there's a lesson on the blues. The class CD only had music from the 1920's or 1930's. If my only exposure to the blues was that; I wouldnt be impressed. So I brought in my own music and played the Doors, Tracy Chapman and other to show that, yes, the blues is still relevant.

Then add the fact that Ive never met a textbook writer that did any research (and some did a bare minimum of teaching) and I realize that coursebook writer know no more than me.

I use textbooks only when I have to

Hi all!

I agree with you Leigh. I use the textbook only when I have to. As I see it, the textbook is but a map that illustrates the different routes, it depicts a path from one location to another. I believe that here in Morocco teaching hasn't been liberated from the shackles of  exam-based textbooks yet: as all Moroccan students have to sit for the same national exam! It remains helpful as long as there are certain content areas to cover; since there some prescribed guidelines to respect. I use it as a compass but I prefer to choose my own ways to get to the desired location!

Cheerio;)

Tarik Boussetta- Global Issues Forum moderator

Interesting discussion. A couple of points and (you're warned) a shameless plug:

1) I think it's useful if we take care with the term "coursebook". The coursebook of old (mass produced, generic, "Richard Branson has travelled around the world in a balloon") is a dinosaur. But we'll see new forms of coursebooks that are more dynamic and relevant and integrated into the web - this'll require e-books but we'll be there in 10 years*. We're going to see the coursebook morph into something different very soon. So I don't think coursebooks are going extinct but are going to be forced to evolve: web 2.0 is the asteroid to the old coursebook dinosaur.

2) As Scott Thornbury said recently, Dogme isn't so much anti-material as it is pro-student. For the new coursebooks to survive they will have to embraced some sort of collaborative, template-driven approach that delivers radical personalization by way of teacher involvement in coursebook design (i.e. very "pro-student"). A 16-year-old needs to learn the present perfect in a song by a band she likes. A 45-year-old manager needs to learn the present perfect practicing explaining his product perfomance over the last 2 quarters for a conference call. Generic coursebooks can't deliver this. Web 2.0 tech plus online publishing plus print-on-demand can.

3) Shameless plug (this is so embarrassing): we've actually built something to do this, a web 2.0-informed collaborative materials development engine; it's a web application, free to teachers and schools, for designing, delivering, and sharing classroom, online, and blended learning. Our goal was to allow any teacher wordwide to create and publish print or e-learning for free in 5 minutes.** We'll be doing a (very) soft launch at the conference and would like to invite anyone interested to help us beta test. We've got a major publisher as a partner and we're "granularizing" their coursebooks and tagging the pieces so they can be searched for, copied, manipulated, re-sequenced, and integrated with teacher-developed material (kinda like what we do at the photocopier, but digitally). I'll be formally announcing this Thursday. 

* Gavin and I had a funny micro-debate in a jammed-full taxi in Bonn about the e-book thing. He said "I believe X" and I said "I completely disagree" and then everyone fell into an embarrassed silence. The debate was so short we could've held it on Twitter.

**i.e. we made the technology super-easy and fast to use. The materials design part is still hard!

I've come into this discussion a little late, but since my name has been invoked, I thought I'd better contribute! With a question:  how far away are we from the day when we, as teachers, can do the following:

a. search on-line for authentic (written or spoken) texts related to a pre-selected topic (e.g. one chosen by our student(s)) and access a transcript of the text (if spoken)

b. access a reliable measure of the text's difficulty, both lexical and syntactic

c. have the text simplified/adapted to suit the level of our student(s)

d. generate, automatically, questions, the answers to which will provide a reliable measure of the learner's comprehension of the text

e. identify significant linguistic features of the text, eg. formulaic language, recurring lexis/structures

f. link to online reference sources/exercises relating to these linguistic features

g. link to other texts on a similar theme, and/or with similar linguistic features

h. generate an on-line discussion about the topic of the text

My suspicion is that we are already at stages (a) through (c) and that stages(d) through (h) are just round the corner. Once operational, the procedures outlined above will render the textual content of coursebooks completely redundant. The only function they will serve is to provide a syllabus - but since all coursebooks follow exactly the same syllabus, this can easily be replicated.  In fact, with little effort I'm sure, software could be designed that provides the teacher with a compilation syllabus that conflates all the grammatical structures of the ten best-selling coursebooks at any one time.

Coursebooks will survive, for a time, but only as iconic relics of another era, just as airline tickets did, long after their function had been replaced by e-tickets.

Scott if I understand your question and you're referring to doing this automagically, then I'm not quite as optimistic as you are on these, but then ironically I've had my head so far inside our software dev for the last 8 months that I'm out of touch with what's new! That said, I imagine it'll be a while before software will do this well. We'll know when we're getting close when we get 60%-80% there with software, and humans clean it up, much like we are with automated translation programs. That might be not too far off.

The approach we're taking is human-powered, but bottom-up: help teachers do this themselves by providing a platform so that long tail effects allow a collaborative process for all this among thousands of users wordwide - sort of how wikipedia has an article on everything, because for almost any topic there are at least a few people in the world that are passionate about it.

So what we'll have is bottom-up materials development that the user community (including publishers) can use, share, modify, re-sequence, evaluate, etc. Then we tag everything so that it's findable, and Ss' needs/interests are defined by tags so material relevant to them is easily accessed. Learning content, assessment tools, syllabuses - whatever the community generates. Jyri Engestrom had a neat observation about social software-driven communities - that many successful ones tend to form "around something"- Flickr for photos, MySpace for music, Dopplr for trips, Corkd/Vaynerchuck for wine, etc. He calls these "social objects". What we want to do is provide tools so that ELT material can be that social object.

What's the point? Radical personalization. In the near future every learner will have his/her personal coursebook, that is as unique as they are.

"...what we'll have is bottom-up materials development that the user
community (including publishers) can use, share, modify, re-sequence,
evaluate, etc."

Cleve, that makes sense. I was thinking of text processing tools as now available on - for example - Compleat Lexical Tutor (http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/) that could immediately check a text for readability, as well as identify key words, clusters etc. What price a program that not only marks up a text for word frequency, but links every word with a) a definition/translation; b) a concordance; and c) another text - automatically?  Can't be that difficult.

 To be or not to be books  depends on two things:

First:

have learners and education system computer technologies in order to be on line

Second:

have books written by  taking  into consideration such  items:

do materials coincide with standard syllabus( themes)

do books include all four skills with pre,while, post activities

do texts(information) include authentic materials

are  presentation, consolidation  of language aspects(grammar,lexis, phonetics) organized in thoughtfull way by using critical thinking, not in the form of non-productive exercises

Does  themes (information) coincide with reality in order to make situations, projects

are pcycological moments (logical, successive, cognitive moments) taken into consideration

First of all we think about contents of books, material design, the aim of the book to create thoughtfull students which can use the materials in their life or "parrot' learners, who are busy with repeating  meaningless exercises according to scenario of some text-books.  

That   information in electronic or paper based   is not so important.

The question  is what (themes)have books, how  it is organized  ( leaner centred or teacher-centred) 

  Now we usually hear about "books of new generation".What kind of books should  "books of new generation be?

I should like to hear your ideas.

 Hello Olwyn and all,

a cute little  idea to opt out of mobile phones but I guess it is not your total shunning technology :).

i guess one can recall the list of innovators, early adopters, early majority adopters,the late majority and the laggards and the Gartner hype cycle. 

I guess it all boils down to the fact that one can opt out until it becomes painful not to use technology

Natasha 

"I guess it all boils down to the fact that one can opt out until it becomes painful not to use technology".

To the users of rolls of parchment, the book represented a new - and possibly bewildering - technology. Not to mention printing. Personally, I prefer to read a book on the train, rather than a Kindle.  But there's a generation emerging for whom such a choice will simply seem quaint.  Much as it surprises me to say it, if IWBs help drive a stake through the heart of the coursebook, I will not be shedding tears.

Hi Scott

 Much as I would like to see a stake driven through the heart of a coursebook, the only thing in teaching that i have so far seen that is more boring than a coursebook, is a coursebook on an IWB!!!!

Some  things are going to be very hard to kill!!

 Best

Nik

I've got to agree with Nik, Scott, that IWBs are publishers' last, desperate (and pretty dull at the end of the day) throw of the dice to keep their share of the pie.

I went to a publisher about three years ago with an idea for a teacher's-book-only coursebook and was told it was exactly what teachers wanted but noone would ever publish it because it didn't involve selling classes full of course books.

So instead I got involved in materials writing for International House in a similar way to Cleve's ideas - bottom-up community-shared publishing - where the teachers take templated and targeted materials and can personalise and adapt them according to their context and publish them themselves.

What we're lacking is colour and images and use of copyrighted materials, so am very much looking forward to Cleve's launch on Thursday...

But we're already well beyond the course book, however much the majority of our students still expect this tradition and enjoy its comforting.structure.

Yes, don't start me on IWBs!  It baffles me why they are called "interactive" - they seem simply to reinforce, and exacerbate, the delivery model of education enshrined in coursebooks. I made myself very unpopular in Brazil a year or two back, by referring to them cheekily as "interactive white elephants" (when the Culturas had invested heavily in them). But seriously, it bothers me that Ministries of Education (such as in Mexico) and other providers are keener to invest in dodgy technology, such as IWBs,  than in teacher education, for example.  Tony Blair was recently in Palestine trying to flog them to the Palestinian authority, many of whose schools don't have electricity or running water. This way madness lies.

I have to say i have mixed feelings about IWBs. I agree that calling them 'interactive' isn't really accurate. I think electronic whiteboard would be a better description.

 I think IWBs despite the name are pretty handy (as long as you have electricity etc.), just as the book is a marvelous and wonderful thing. But in the same way as books are wonderful and coursebooks are not, the same is true of IWBs and a lot of the content that ends up on them.

It's really all about how they are used. Who in their right mind would want to interact with a whitebaord?? Learning, and especially language learning, is about interacting with people. IWBs can help to make that happen, but so much of the way they get used and the content designed for them is unfortunately NOT leading to this.

 As you say Scott, so much of this comes down to lack of investment in training and of course that gap in the training is the ideal place for publishers to step in with their IWB coursebooks.

Best

Nik

Well, there was the interactive videodisc ...

One thing I have noticed is that the tools that could be said to make the IWB "interactive" - slates and response systems -  generally get left out of the package. I wonder why this is Is it because the people selling IWBs market them as add-ons rather than being integral to the system? Or is ther another reason

Pete

Well...

All those 'pods' and 'eggs' and things like that cost more money, you see? And when you're already spending a lot on the basic equipment and installation, it's a bit rich to come up with some more for enough of them to make sense in a classroom, especially if you have 30 people in your classroom.

All this talk of publishers dragging themselves kicking and screaming into the 1990s is quite interesting. To date most of them have contented themselves with 'Easy English Digital' (replace your book title where appropriate). And what can you do with this stuff? Why, you can show the activity book exercises on screen and use drag'n'drop! Yes! And you can enlarge parts of the text.... and you can listen to the listening material and press play and pause ON SCREEN!

And when you wake up again you can just do it with the original book because that, at least, doesn't crash and doesn't necessitate any training in technology. Plus, you have access to the book, but not to computers... and the connection's down again, and the electricity just went off because it's raining. If we're going to be using technology in the 21st century it should be exciting, creative and - above all - social. And voting using little eggs on a workbook listening exercise played on an IWB doesn't cut it. Many industries have, as yet, to find their place in the new social web that is becoming the dominant force - ways of monetising content, etc. - it's not just print publishers. But until they learn to think as citizens of the 'social' planet then they're not going to go too far.

I'm interested in what Cleve is going to reveal... interested in the granular tagging of a publisher's material. But I'm still wondering if it's going to be a case of pearls from swine. If I can search, download, change and print the interview with the drummer from Steeleye Span, does that make it any more interesting? If I wanted something interesting and relevant for my learners (and yes, as I've already stated elsewhere on these forums, I don't have any - I'm in teacher training currently) wouldn't I just use the Net to prepare something, or adapt something? Why would I go to the same amount of bother for something which will already be targetted at a global audience and therefore sharing the same 'generalised' problems we've talked about here?

I gave up coursebooks long before I moved into teacher training. Why? Well, for a lot of the reasons stated above, but mostly because they were largely dull, irrelevant and out of date before they got to my classroom. I'm not sure that's changed much since my day. It was quicker for me to grab something off the Net and get it ready for my classes than it was for me to try to make the coursebook interesting or suitable enough to be able to open it in class with any confidence or any enthusiasm.

Instead of paying for a small chunk of irrelevant material from a publisher, why wouldn't I go to the much bigger online community and share with them? Talk to the Webhedas, talk to the online teacher communities in my country, see what they've come up with and use it. And then perhaps contribute something of my own... That strikes me as infinitely more sensible.

Of course, in those countries where access, technology, etc., are still limited, the publishers still have a potentially lucrative market - but I can't envisage a market in quite a lot of the world, in the same way that an online colleague of mine hasn't touched a book for years in her courses in Venezuela and has managed to enthuse and teach hundreds of people with her own creativity and enthusiasm. She's not alone in that desire to want suitable materials for her learners, but she's definitely one of the few who, to date, have broken free of the (largely) native speaker global English coursebook dominance that has blighted the lives of learners from Argentina to Zimbabwe for way too long.

Hi there

Just trying to catch up on this topic... and one post really forced me to contribute – “dodgy technology such as IWBs”.  I have heard many arguments against IWBs and more often than not, they come down to the use of the IWBs rather than the IWBs themselves – it’s true, £2000 spent on an IWB would probably be more effectively spent on a teacher training course, but it can’t be said that IWBs are dodgy, read useless, technology.  Why blame the poor harmless window on the world hanging on the wall for bad teaching?  All is it trying to do is show you real examples of authentic written and spoken English, show you images or video to make explanations clearer, help provide live conversation with other teachers and learners around the world, help the learners better connect and engage in the topic of conversation, help them build their personal language learning skills... help them prepare for life outside the classroom.  Used in the right way, I believe IWBs are an incredibly powerful tool to support any kind of learning methodology.   

Sorry, perhaps getting a little off topic here but in our school, I have seen incredible improvements in students’ ability and more importantly attitudes to learning that can be directly attributed to the addition of IWBs in the classrooms.

(I give course books two to three years before technology is robust enough for a majority of teachers to confidently, consistently enter their classroom Dogme style).

Just my two cents.

Richard

I’ve taken quite a few language courses over the years, and I have to say I’ve discovered things through the books I used on them - writers I’d not heard of, cities I’d never been to, even some useful language - which really piqued my interest. I’m sure any one of us could critically tear those books apart, but for me they have been a part of some very memorable learning moments, which usually happened in an enjoyable atmosphere once or twice a week.

That was not the kind of situation I was used to as a teacher.

Of course, teaching several hours a week, every week, year after year, with the same series, I would get bored with the repetitiveness (if it’s unit 1 we’ll review the present tenses) and the irrelevance of a lot of material to some learners. I remember once despairing at a course book that had been chosen for a group of YLs and had a whole unit on global travelling (‘Can I pay by credit card please?’)! And of course I quickly realised that using carefully(ish) selected alternative materials, depending on the learners, could make a difference. Above all I remember an 11 or 12 year old come up to me at the end of one lesson to ask why all course books were the same… I think it was then that I thought 'if I was DOS it would all be different'.

Only when I moved up to that position did I realise the complexities involved - I won't bore you with them right now, but it's enough to say my ideals (which I still believe in) were frustrated...

So, despite my feelings as a teacher, I don't think course books will disappear for a while yet in the context I’m familiar with (Europe and Latin America). They may morph into something more electronic, they may become available in bite-sized chunks, be interchangeable and downloadable, but I suspect the organisational role they play at institutional level (and in a lot of learners’ heads) will take a long time to change.

if you have a spare minute, have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ for medieval help with the introduction of the book... quite funny.

Richard

Today, for the very first time in a very, very long time I had to use a coursebook.

I won't say which but... it's a popular one.  

For the very first time in a long, long time I could barely make it through my 8hrs intensive without wanting to simply fall asleep.

The reason, in my opinion, why textbooks are facing their end whether it's in five years or ten is because they are full of inane, repetitive and ill-advised exercises.  Really, does there need to be a gap fill on every page?   

Textbooks are all too often written to prescribed formulas that include copying the layouts and themes of the best-selling book of the moment and are not based enough on real-learning standards and interactive communicative benefits.

It's all a bit too John Grisham - the first lot were good and the rest are just a repeat of the formula, different characters, different covers, same blah, blah, blah.

Karenne

I may have overlooked it, but in this discussion I seem to be missing the bit about students. As much as teachers seem not to like coursebooks, many many students (esp adult ones) like the security that a course book brings. Coursebooks (rightly or wrongly) represent their sense of what their course will look like, how they will progress through the year and so on. Obviously these things can be surplanted with technology but I feel it will take a few years to convince them.