Heather Seitz on What Makes Her Textbook Different

Speakers: Heather Seitz, Johnson County Community College

Heather Seitz: From day one, we really thought about this as an interactive platform. So this was designed to be a digital resource for students. And so we've included lots of really intentional elements to help this textbook come alive for those students. So we have, for example, "engage" polls where students can think about how the concept that they're about to learn connects to their everyday life, and they get to see how does everybody taking this class, how does it relate to them? And so that's a way to connect students digitally into this world of microbiology. We also think about, in every Study Unit, what is the right interactive to use? We have intentional ways in which we're helping a student navigate a figure by either using tabbed figures or slider bars. We have lots of figures that come alive through animation and so different ways that students can be interacting with the textbook, not just reading it. And all the courseware that goes with it, of course, is designed to help students really be active in their learning even when they're outside of the class. Another really important part of how this textbook is different is that we really thought about the language that we use, right? So biology and microbiology in general, have a lot of new words and vocabulary that can be intimidating for some students. And so we wanted to be very intentional in how we introduce words. We use some background about where the word came from, how it connects to other things they've learned. And where possible, we've reduced the jargon, so we've really made the writing approachable for students so that they can read the sentence the first time and not have to unpack every word of the sentence. It includes all the essential vocabulary we need, but we really tried to help students understand what the concepts mean, give those in text explanations of something, so that they don't get lost and maybe feel frustrated that they don't understand what a paragraph is telling them. Another way that the textbook is unique is really how we have scaffolded the activities and the language, right, in thinking about that digital forward process. So how can we make this textbook come alive for students? How can they connect it to their healthcare careers? We wanted to think about these students as future professionals in healthcare and how are they going to keep our communities healthy and safe? And we know that they're gonna be often on the front lines of interacting with microbiology and infectious disease, so we really included all of those characters and the people that play a role in healthcare throughout. We've kept it very healthcare focused. We've utilized our nursing advisory board and faculty across the country to help us really understand how we tell the microbiology content that we need in a way that is appropriate for our future healthcare professionals, and those that are going to go on into further education. We were intentional in including lots of different kinds of professions. We know not all students end up in the first choice profession in healthcare that they maybe had wanted to become, and so we wanted to include lots of stories. You'll see things about the clinical lab scientist's job or the radiology tech or respiratory technician. The nurse, right? The nursing home staff. We use lots of different characters in that healthcare world to help students understand how microbiology connects to all of those future fields and keep it really relevant for them.