Abstract:

Teaching English language classes to groups of 100 undergraduate Thai students is challenging. Not only does the number of students present a problem, but also the diversity of their learning styles, commitment level to class activities, and their English proficiency. Moreover, different faculty teaching the course to different groups of students creates great difficulty in maintaining consistent course quality.

Based on the experiences of delivering the courses over the past two years, we have proposed a solution to these problems by implementing (1) a standard course syllabus, (2) a standardized exam, and (3) a dynamic textbook.
The paper focuses mainly on the dynamic textbook project. Course objectives are set and are required to be met by all students taking the course. However, as a School of IT, we believe that delivering a class with paper-based textbooks or electronic-but-static textbooks do not meet students’ expectations.

The dynamic textbook has features including (1) exercise questions based on students’ mistakes, (2) different explanations of the same topic to enable deeper understanding, and (3) higher level contents for those who have a stronger background or are quick learners. The dynamic textbook can be used either as a class supplement tool or as a complete self-learning tool.
Many students at Thai universities do not have regular accesses to a computer. The dynamic textbook is therefore implemented both as a software application as well as being paper-based, providing all students the opportunity to learn and giving the same learning results.

The paper reports on the design and implementation details of the dynamic textbook as well as select usage results.

Keywords:

Dynamic Textbook, Educational Software, Educational tool.