The AT&T Learning Studio at ACU recently produced its first annual iBook to showcase some of the people and projects the Learning Studio was involved with in its first year of operation.
The iBook, titled “Learning Studio: Year One Report,” is available for free on the iPad in the Apple iBookstore. The iBook is 35 pages. Along with the stories there are 14 videos, several graphs and interactive widgets, including the virtual tour of the facility.
Apple released iBooks Author, a new publishing tool, around the time the Learning Studio began to work on the Year One Report. It created an opportunity to use an innovative tool on a major project and to think about how this tool could impact ACU and higher education in general.
“One thing we’re always on the lookout for at the Learning Studio is ways we can sort of innovate and test new ideas and new technologies while we work,” Â said Nathan Driskell, media production specialist at the Learning Studio. “We got the chance to do that with this project, and now we’re looking forward to seeing what’s next.”
Because they used the iBooks Author publishing tool, the interactive book will only work on iPads. Though that was a major downside, the project was still deemed a worthwhile experiment due to the growing number of iPads on ACU’s campus. The iBook could be something virtually every faculty member and student would be able to use for free.
Kyle Dickson, director of the Learning Studio who also edited the iBook said, ” We wanted to use iBooks Author for the report as an opportunity to push the bounds of iPad publishing with more and more tablets coming to campus in the next year. It is important for us to explore rich media content for those devices.”
On Sept. 19, the Learning Studio presented a live webinar called “iBooks Author for Advanced Users and Projects,” for members of the New Media Consortium, an international community of experts in educational technology. ACU was among the first universities to experiment with this new software, so it was a good opportunity for others to learn the successes and challenges that were presented while designing the book.
Students and faculty that are interested can download the iBook or the PDF version at acu.edu/lsreport.
