SimUText Ecology - replace your ecology textbook

If you've been following our blog, you've seen me make several posts about e-textbooks. One reason I've been following new developments closely is because we have been working on our own replacement for an ecology text. It's extremely gratifying, after a huge amount of work from a lot of people, to start going public with our SimUText Active Learning System and the SimBio Interactive Ecology Chapters which SimUText hosts.

I won't give a big description of the system here because we have put up a lot of information about SimUText on our website. Go to our home page and click on the big banner on top. The basic idea, though, is that we are combining the kinds of ecological and evolutionary simulations we've been doing for 12 years with the content found in a typical ecology textbook, along with lots of questions that provide instant feedback (formative assessment for the students), animations, videos, and other interactive elements to help students learn and enjoy ecology. The innovation is not only the collection of interactives we've put in, it's also the way that we have carefully integrated all these different elements into a cohesive progression through the material.

Some of you are already familiar with SimUText because yours was one of the 117 classes that has helped test it over the past two years. We've had an overwhelmingly positive response from those classes, and most (94%) of our beta-testing professors want to use SimUText again this coming school year. Students liked the ability to play with simulations of the concepts they were reading about, and get instant feedback on whether they were understanding the material. You can see I'm bragging a little here, but I think this is the best, most innovative teaching tool our company has ever made, so I'm a bit excited to finally be telling people about it. If you teach ecology or environmental science, I'd urge you to check out SimUText (if you're in another field of biology, stay tuned). I or one of the other authors would be happy to personally do a short webinar demo for you, and we can also let you play with an evaluation copy ("play" is the right verb here - SimUText is fun, just like our labs). Come this fall, 2010, you'll be able to upgrade your standard printed ecology text to a SimUText and I think you'd be remiss if you didn't take a look.