Läroböcker i en digital värld : En komparativ läroboksanalys av analoga och digitala läroböcker iskolämnet historia

Textbooks are published both as traditional books and as digital books. The digital format allows textbooks to have a richer content of media and functions, whereas traditional textbooks are limited to what you can print on a piece of paper. This study consists of two substudies that compare the similarities and differences between traditional and digital textbooks. The textbooks that are analyzed in this study are published for the school subject history with students attending lower secondary school or upper secondary school in mind. History as a subject has been chosen because students tend to see the textbook as something boring and that the digital technology could change that with a richer content.The first study compares textbooks that are published in two editions, one traditional and one digital. The second study compares textbooks that are different, textbooks that have been published as a traditional textbook and textbooks that are born digital. These studies use Jackie Hee-Young Kim and Hye-Yoon Jung’s theoretical framework to analyze the textbooks. The framework consists of four categories where digital textbooks can make the students learn more effectively, the categories are hypertext, multimedia, interactivity, and self-regulated learning.Our findings show that the different types of textbooks are more similar than different. The digital textbooks contain more functions and have richer content, both in terms of media as movie or sound clips and with additional material. The use of digital technology for self- regulated learning and interactivity were more common in the textbooks that are born digital. But these separate functions were present in at least one of the textbooks that had been published both as a traditional and digital textbook, so it’s not possible to draw a general conclusion that all textbooks published both traditional and digital use less of these technologies. Only that it was less common among the textbooks in this study. In all of the studied textbooks, the text was still in the center, so the additional features are more of a compl than a complete shift in how the textbook is designed