‘We weren’t aware that alternatives existed. We were happy enough using printed textbooks’, says Julian Baker, the IB Coordinator at Box Hill School, a GCSE and IB/A-level school in Surrey. They were among the first UK schools to fully implement Kognity, the digital publisher of GCSE and IB intelligent textbooks, and, after a couple of years, are now looking at the option of completely phasing out printed textbooks for their IB students.
The printed textbook has been at the core of learning for centuries, and one that many schools still hold a traditional view on. However, in the face of evolving content, technology, and pedagogy, challenging these views in UK schools is important to ensure a seamlessly integrated and enhanced learning experience. Box Hill School provides an interesting case study on how challenging the traditional view of textbooks came about in their school, and the impact switching to intelligent textbooks has had.
Are textbooks connected to a digital strategy?
Julian from Box Hill School isn’t the only person unaware of other options to using printed textbooks. In fact, I’ve met between 300–400 schools around the world, and I can count on one hand the number of schools who have been looking actively to change from the printed textbook. Very few think that there is anything missing from their traditional textbooks until they start to realise what the alternative is, and what the impact could be. As Julian notes, they only started thinking of a different way of doing things once they had seen an alternative. It got staff thinking about how studying can be very book-based and it would be good to also have something more interactive to suit different learning styles. ‘We were relying on what we had always used.’
This is a view I fully understand. In all my meetings with schools, very few have an actual strategy for how to incorporate technology and its advances into the learning environment. Most equate technology with hardware, which in my opinion, is missing most of the potential of a digital learning environment. Having 30 chromebooks and a 3D printer is not a digital strategy. The strategy only starts to formulate when you look at the next step—what is the pedagogy this hardware will support? How will this tie in to the work that teachers are already doing? How does this fit in with the curriculum? How can we use this to foster some of the things that schools are accused of stifling, such as creativity? How will this help my teachers teach, and my students learn?
I can understand why this gap in strategy has arisen—even for me working within EdTech every day, the landscape is noisy and confusing. There are so many products, solutions and services out there. Many market themselves as doing versions of the same thing. Many are isolated solutions, serving only one part of a learning environment (like an admin tool or quiz app), or generic products not geared to any curriculum. Many do not have proper training for their users, and are not very user-friendly. What annoys me the most is when EdTech products imply they want to ‘revolutionise the classroom’, when they do not understand what intricate ecosystems schools are. My view has always been that some sectors are able to be revolutionised, but some need to be ‘evolutionised’. Education is definitely one where we need to deliberately work to incrementally improve the existing ecosystem, rather than radically disrupting it.
And of course there is the question that I’m so happy comes up more and more often—what actually works? However, school management often puts the responsibility of figuring this out on teachers, who are already stressed and not equipped to take on that ownership. Therefore, most hardware ends up being underutilised, teachers are frustrated by technological systems they aren’t trained to use, and we see a generally negative view on technology in the classroom—tech becomes ‘yet another thing’ rather than a core solution to learning challenges.
Intelligent textbooks impact results
Intelligent textbooks are different to traditional, printed textbooks in several ways. On the surface, they are cloud-based textbooks, accessed via a subscription. However, at their core, intelligent textbooks leverage technological advances to establish an engaging learning environment and constant two-way flow of communication between students and teachers.
Intelligent textbooks present information to students in a multitude of engaging ways, ranging from text, videos, animations, soundbites, 3D graphics and interactive models. Students are also empowered to continuously monitor their own level of understanding through embedded assessment questions, which are automatically corrected by the software. On the other side, teachers are provided with up-to-date, analysed student data that enables them to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each student, thereby personalising the learning experience for students.
Imagining alternatives
Back to Box Hill School—one major issue preventing schools from thinking about transitioning to an intelligent textbook is their perception of what that alternative would be. Before, Box Hill School teachers hadn’t tried much else in terms of digital learning apart from CD-ROMs from the book. This then limits the perception of what a substitute to the printed book could be, as a CD-ROM isn’t very inspiring or engaging. This is probably our largest challenge—overcoming the mindset surrounding what alternatives exist.
However, once Box Hill School teachers had seen the potential of intelligent textbooks, they were quick to roll it out to students and teachers. ‘The setting up was so simple—done so efficiently and in a timely fashion’, says Julian.
This was in 2017, and since then the school has used intelligent textbooks for its post-16 IB cohort. It is a fairly small school, with roughly 25 students in each cohort, but despite this, they have managed to rack up impressive usage. Students have spent roughly 2,000 hours with the intelligent textbooks, read close to 6,000 sections of the book, and answered 20,000 questions.
The most encouraging indication that implementing intelligent textbooks is having an effect, is the impact it seems to have had on the weaker students. Julian says, ‘last year’s weaker students’ improved grades may have been partly due to this. We had a 100% pass rate, and those students who were touch-and-go may have benefitted from intelligent textbooks.’
This exemplifies how hard it is to measure impact of specific products in education. We would want nothing better than to be able to say conclusively, ‘implement this and your results will improve by this much’, but quotes like the one from Julian and the results of our own surveys are our best estimate of impact. Isolating impact from one particular product is nearly impossible—I’m fully open to the fact that Box Hill School’s pass rates could equally be because of a change in other factors such as teachers, teaching methods and the students themselves.
However, what gives me encouragement that intelligent textbooks do have some effect on results is that this is something we hear quite often from schools. Another UK school recently told us, ‘we’ve seen grades go up by an average of 2 points [out of 7 points possible] in subjects where they have been used fully’. Similarly, a school in the United States said that their school averages had gone up, with the only change having been that they implemented intelligent textbooks. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a start at least.
Helping teachers with workload and personalisation of teaching
Importantly however, it’s not only on grades that the impact has been seen. The challenges faced by Box Hill School are similar to those most UK schools report facing, with teacher workload at the top of the agenda. When asked why Box Hill School adopted intelligent textbooks, the following quote summed it up:
My colleagues said go for it—they loved the fact that you could easily monitor student learning and progress with the strength bar and checkpoint questions. You can then reinforce their learning with follow up questions to see where student weaknesses are. The fact that it also removes the marking from teachers is crucial. It improves efficiency, but most importantly supports student-centred learning and saves teachers’ time —this was the initial hope and it has proven to be the case.
The question I get asked most often from teachers is, ‘is your technology trying to replace me?’ The answer is that this couldn’t be further from the truth—we are trying to make the teacher irreplaceable. But to do that, we have to help the teacher be able to focus much more on the reason they entered the profession from the beginning—to teach.
We want to remove as much admin, do as much marking, analyse as much data, and collate as much interesting content as possible so that teachers don’t need to spend time on this. This is why we have designed our intelligent textbooks to include a built-in assignment tool, which automatically marks assignments (both question and reading assignments), to continuously track and analyse the students’ performance, and to incorporate an exam prep feature for each student. Everything we do aims to empower the teacher to go back to the classroom and become the guide, the mentor and the coach for each individual student. As a teacher at Box Hill School says: ‘It can provide specific teaching to match the needs of the individual student, which is needed these days.’
Helping students own their learning journey and language
Regarding impact on students, Julian says, ‘intelligent textbooks put the student in control to work in the way that suits their needs. Where teachers can’t repeat the same part of their lesson over and over again, students can watch the videos until they get the point! It puts students in control of their learning’. In a time where many students feel overwhelmed about the amount of material they need to cover, it’s vital to help students easily identify what their individual needs are and how they should study. That’s why the intelligent textbooks are designed to do exactly this, automatically. One student explains; ‘It is a great source of information, with its way of attempting check questions and getting automatic feedback for every topic.’
Some 25% of Box Hill School’s students also have an international background, with English as a Second Language. Thus, it is an additional challenge to ensure that all students are able to access and understand the material. Several students at Box Hill School have commented on intelligent, digital textbooks helping them with this exact issue. With our built-in search functions (which clearly don’t exist in a printed textbook) as well as the ability to use Google Translate directly in our textbooks, we offer ESL students a completely different level of accessibility to content. Julian summarises, ‘we want learner autonomy and intelligent textbooks do this. We will continue using it because it ultimately is the most effective way to provide textbooks for students and, from the educational point of view, we get positive feedback from students so want them to continue.’
Intelligent textbooks as an example of how technology can work for schools
Ultimately, any EdTech product should strive for this—engaged students who find learning enjoyable and rewarding. Intelligent textbooks are an evolved version of something that has existed in the classroom for centuries, but had not been adapted to the rapidly changing landscape of education. It is, in my opinion, a great example of how we don’t need to tear up everything and start again—incremental changes designed with the right intentions of empowering teachers to teach and students to learn can cause widespread, positive effects.
What it takes is a willingness to look at problems with a different mindset and design products that work for the ecosystem, teachers and students. We have to take responsibility to ensure that the transition to a more technology-based classroom is as smooth, beneficial, and empowering as possible.
Karin Bjerde is the Head of Strategic Growth at Kognity, a Swedish EdTech company which publishes intelligent, digital textbooks now used in over 90 countries, for the GCSE, IB, and IGCSE curricula. The content is interactive with text, videos, animations, and 3D graphs, students receive automatic feedback on their progress, and teachers can send assignments that are automatically corrected.
Kognity is a Swedish EdTech (Education Technology) company launched in 2014 by former International Baccalaureate (IB) students. Having realised that technology, with all its potential, had had little significant impact on learning efficacy in classrooms around the world, Kognity aimed to do something no one else was doing—making the textbook a living resource, aimed to empower the teacher and engage the student on their individual learning journey. Since launching in 2014, schools in over 90 countries have chosen to implement Kognity’s intelligent textbooks, with great results. In one customer survey, 87% of students who replied claimed that Kognity helped them improve their grades and 95% of teachers said that it helped their students learn.