How to study contemporary digital teaching materials? Merging traditional textbook analysis with analysis of digital materials

This article reports on an attempt how to study contemporary digital teaching materials based on using traditional textbook analysis and methods for analysing digital materials. The explored method combines traditional textbook analysis with multimodal perspectives on digital media, with the aim of analysing layout, structure, and content. In the exploration of the method, twelve digital teaching materials from three publishers in Sweden was selected and guided the research process towards both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The findings are twofold. First, the method as such demonstrates one type of finding, which benefits methodological triangulation between layout, structure, and content. Second, other findings demonstrate varying the layout, structure, and content separately and in combination. With the method, different types of frequencies in layout, structure and content emerged, as did qualities in the content within a specific topic of the national curricula.