Experiences using a collaborative electronic textbook

Much has been made of the transition of the instructor's role from "Sage on the Stage" to "Guide on the Side", focusing on active and collaborative learning in the classroom. The process of acquiring knowledge from textbooks has largely remained unaffected by this transition. Our work on electronic textbooks (e-textbooks) has focused on building e-textbooks that extend the reach of collaborative and active learning techniques to the reading process. This paper describes the outcomes of using our e-textbook in a one semester course on programming language design and implementation, including the impact on student learning, the degree to which they took advantage of the e-textbook's collaborative and active features, and their reaction to the use of the e-textbook as the primary text resource.