With the development of science and technology, our education system and resources have become digital. With the better flexibility, convenience, comfort, and cost-effectiveness provided, online courses are the new preferences of educators and learners. One such study material that is very useful for online educators and learners is ebooks.
It is an electronic version of the printed books that teachers and students can access on their networking devices. To launch course effectively, ebooks help to a great extent. It can be used as a promotional tool, sent by emails to the target audience, used in live classes to teach, enhance the learning outcomes and expand the course sales respectively. Let us discuss the main elements of an effective ebook.
Important elements of ebooks
1. An effective cover and title
The cover of an ebook will be the first step by which the learners will judge it. No matter how effective the inner content is, if the cover is not appealing to students, they won’t prefer to use or purchase your ebooks. Therefore online course creators should make sure to have an effective book cover. This is an essential element to work upon. Add an understandable book title. Keep it simple, don’t overdo the title. Extremely fancy words become difficult to understand. So keep it simple, and short. Add images, and include branding elements. For example, if it’s a biology e-book, make the visual cover have some biology pictures, equations, and fun facts.
2. A table of content
Before starting any subject or book, we need to know what all lessons and sub-topics we will be covering. This complete idea is given by an index or table of content. Similarly, to make your ebook more organized and easy to approach for the audience, it should have a table of content. This helps learners to refer to the individual chapters which are relevant to them. Not every lesson mentioned is useful or important for learners. A table of content helps learners to know whether the topic they want is included or not and directly reach it by knowing the right page number or the link.
3. An understandable content
Another element of an effective ebook is understandable content. If the ebook has some difficult words, fancy English, vocabulary, and phrases it becomes difficult for students to understand. Also if the topics become too detailed, they can be irrelevant for the learners too. So make sure that the lessons in the ebook are understandable for the students. If you are using any new word or term, embedding links for its meaning and details are important. Also, for more information, you can add reference links for students too.
4. Engaging and visually appealing
The online course selling website is effective as they offer students a self-paced and proper learning experience. To do so, the ebooks should be engaging for them. Reading the texts and lessons from phones and computers can become difficult if the content is not engaging. It needs to have some visual elements too.
Big texts and just words appearing on a screen won’t be interacting with students. To sell your online courses better or increase the traffic to your website, make sure that your ebooks are interactive. It should contain images and infographics. With the help of visualization, students tend to understand the concepts better and more quickly Tables, charts, graphs, and diagrams can be added. This will make learning fun and interesting too.
5. Printer and mobile-friendliness
No matter how digital tools are helping us, still, the traditional book reading method is highly preferable by a lot of learners. An ebook should get printed easily too. Many students like to have the sheets in hand, underline the keywords and read. So make sure that your ebook is designed in a format that can get printed easily. The second feature that an ebook should include is movie friendliness. Not all students prefer to carry laptops with them everywhere and some may not own one too. A smartphone is something that every student has nowadays. So make sure that your ebook can be accessed via mobile phones.
Conclusion
Audio-visual learning tools provide learners with a proper academic understanding and one such tool is an ebook. By reading the above-mentioned information we can make out the important elements of an effective ebook. All online course creators can follow this to design quality ebooks for their courses. This will ensure both students and teachers succeed.