Promoting interaction by integrating a question and answer forum with a digital textbook

As digital textbooks become more common in formal learning environments, there is an opportunity to embed technology that represents our growing understanding of best pedagogical practices into the textbook itself. Integrating collaborative technologies into a textbook platform provides substantial opportunities for facilitating classroom discourse surrounding the textbook content. However, to be successful in a digital textbook, these technologies have to be perceived by students as useful, and must function well on the tablet platform. This paper proposes the integration of Q&A into a digital textbook platform as a way of facilitating productive collaboration, designing for the tablet, and engaging students with the technology. We describe our implementation of an integrated Q&A system and digital textbook, and outline the results of a pilot study that demonstrate how the Q&A system might be effectively used by groups of students.