Editor’s Toolkit: Writing an Interactive Ebook Anthology – Page 7

To round out your project’s interactive reading materials, you can add other recommended activities—such as assignments, practice exercises and assessments—as supplemental activities outside of the reading materials. These materials can be placed within the Cognella Active Learning Platform, before or after your reading materials and exercises. Many of these features can be automatically graded to track participation, student responses, or final scores.

Cases arise where a reading may change or be removed from a project. This can pose some challenges for interactive content. If activities are tied closely to individual readings and those readings are replaced, then some activities will require editing, while others may need to be removed or entirely rebuilt. (Even individual quiz questions are likely to undergo revision when a reading is adjusted.)

To help minimize the amount of interactive content editing required when adjusting readings, consider the following strategies:

• Develop activities related to concepts that reinforce the readings more broadly. For instance, write questions or exercises related to your original writing or separately-approved multimedia resources of your own selection, such as images or videos. That way, these exercises and resources will retain their usefulness even if a reading changes in the future.
• Focus more complex activities on important, evergreen topics. Invest creative energy in activities centered on crucial themes or topics that will likely be covered in related readings, even if those specific readings change. Ideally, the more complex an activity is, the more potential longevity it will have.
• Choose activity types that can transfer to new readings easily or with minimal updates. Some of the easiest activities for you to revise are fill-in- the-blanks, drag-the-words, and multiple-choice questions. Pairing activities like these with readings that may change will be helpful for later terms.

Just as every book or ebook is different, so is every author. Cognella authors will have personal preferences about how to organize and develop their interactive ebook.

Reading the Editor’s Toolkits is a great place to begin learning more about how to best craft your original pieces. Your editorial team members are also happy to discuss each resource in more detail as it relates to your specific project.

Unsure of next steps or have additional questions? Ask your project editor!