Internet Learning Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 102

Internet Learning Journal – Volume 4, Issue 1 – Spring 2015
A call for homogeneous textbooks that combine independent authorship with peerreviewed
journal research was announced as early as the late 1920s (Kulp, 1927).
Three schools of thoughts highlight how editorial content in textbooks are shaped.
DeGroot and Mashak (1978) maintain textbooks are written by academics with little
practical experience. Coppola et al. (2002) argue that teachers with classroom field
experience write education textbooks. Others like Arnold (1993) state that textbooks should
be a collaboration of those with teaching, research, and publishing experience.
Mehrabian (1971) tied immediacy to psychological closeness between the
communication sender and receiver. Throughout the next three decades, the efficacy of
immediacy would be analyzed in on-ground classrooms, distance learning classes, and
online classrooms. Immediacy was differentiated from other online classroom terms such as
collaboration, interaction, and engagement that might otherwise be related to behaviors
cultivated from both teacher and student. Yorks (2005) said the academy should take onus
for transferring knowledge to industry and the field. According to Bleiklie and Powell
(2005) scholars sometimes create new terminology for use in the practice. Terminology is
the language a field uses to document theories and paradigms (He, 2004). Immediacy is a
term created by scholars and it is unknown how immediacy is being communicated to the
practice of teacher education outside of the academy.
A review of higher education textbook publishing illustrated that some textbooks
reflect independent authorship, known as idiosyncratic, and other textbooks incorporate a
more homogeneous approach combining scholarly knowledge and a variety of opinions.
Griggs et al. (2004) maintained that curriculum development should be tied to textbook
development and that authors should strive to agree on topics, terminology, and presentation
order based on chapter headings. In the Griggs et al. study, higher education introductory
psychology textbooks lacked sufficient scholarly citations, and the chapter headings and
nomenclature appeared to be more idiosyncratic than homogeneous. Withrow et al. (2004)
observed uniformity among criminal justice introductory texts based on inclusion of
relatively even numbers of scholarly studies.
The educational scholarly community documented teacher immediacy throughout
the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (Rocca, 2004). Later, researchers demonstrated how to deploy
teacher immediacy in the online classroom regardless of an asynchronous or synchronous
modality (Easton & Katt, 2005).
RESEARCH METHOD
The primary purpose of the study was to document how prominently and frequently
popular mass-marketed online teaching textbooks include acknowledgment of an important
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