Educational policy and planning for future education development of e-Textbooks

This thesis aims to provide a strong foundation for successful adoption of electronic textbooks (e-Textbooks) in school education. E-Textbooks are digitized forms of textbooks which have been envisioned to replace existing paper-based textbooks due to its educational advantages. In the context of this research they are textbooks adapted to the national school curriculum. Therefore, it is of paramount importance for the relevant parties (i.e. national and state governments, or school districts) to address their educational policy and identify the challenges they might face, as well as to identify decisions and projects they need to launch in order to provide educational advantages for students that can be applied nation-wide. This thesis starts by providing a brief overview of e-Textbooks, and subsequently an extensive discussion on challenges associated with e-Textbooks in the pursuit of replacing traditional textbooks with e-Textbooks. Additionally, this thesis further provides an extensive review on how the challenges have been approached using existing e-Textbook technologies, such as multi-touch technology, e-Paper, Web 2.0 and cloud computing. The main focus of this thesis is to develop and validate “the E-Textbook in Education Policy: ETiP”, focusing on Eight domains (Policy, Infrastructure, Curriculum, Educational content, Standardisation, Human resource, Education Information System and Social study). The ETiP has been developed using the following set of three stages: 1) The Developing Stage in which computers are supplied to schools and computer networks are built at the basic level. Basic curriculum studies of e-Textbooks are conducted by the relevant national authority; 2) The Take-off Stage is reached when the construction of infrastructure required for the usage of electronic textbooks in schools is completed. At this stage, prototypes of e-Textbooks are developed; pilot testing is conducted at schools; and, 3) The Expansion Stage, where new educational content is further developed and revised with the enhancement of infrastructure as time goes by. The distribution of the e-Textbook is also conducted nationwide