Internet Learning Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2015 | Page 106

Internet Learning Journal – Volume 4, Issue 1 – Spring 2015
The quantitative study included the content analysis instrument to examine the two
sets of online textbooks available from the most popular online bookseller, Amazon.com.
The study involved comparing one set of 10 of the most popular textbooks published from
1999 to 2002, when online education was struggling for legitimacy (Lao, 2002) to a more
modern set. The modern set contained 9 of the most popular online educational textbooks
published from 2003 to 2007, a period in which the efficacy of online education continued
(Brown, 2006; Day et al., 2006; Moskal et al., 2006). The sets did not include an equal
number of textbooks because each set represented all the available most popular,
independently authored online teaching textbooks based on search term criteria discussed
earlier.
The textbooks were only available as traditional perfect-bound or softcover
textbooks. The study involved searching each textbook for key words, such as immediacy,
within the table of contents, text, and reference pages and tracking paragraph counts related
to broad and minor operational definitions of immediacy. Percentage of total paragraphs
within the chapters served as comparative data. Trained coders scanned the reference pages
for scholarly immediacy authors.
Population
The population was drawn from the largest mass-marketed bookstore online,
Amazon.com. According to Creswell et al. (2003), the term population refers to individuals
or objects that share common characteristics. The first step of deriving the population
included selecting the Amazon.com website menu tab entitled textbooks. Mass-marketed
textbook referred to any length manuscript for sale, other than an article, in softcover, also
known as perfect-bound, or hardcover available to the public from online booksellers under
a specific portion of such websites labeled textbooks.
The search included only textbooks from the college textbook category tab and only
the most popular, independently authored hardcover or softcover texts using the terms
engaging, online, students or teaching, online, students. Initially, the search included the
above terms paired with immediacy, but the search did not yield any textbooks. Thus, the
dearth prompted more obvious and popular terms, such as collaboration, interaction, and
engaging. Chevalier and Mayzlin (2006) explained Amazon.com’s ranking system as
follows:
Chevalier and Goolsbee (2003a) reported that Amazon.com claims that for books in
the top 10,000 ranks, the rankings are based on the last 24 hours and are updated hourly. For
books ranked 10,001–100,000, the ranks are updated once a day. For books ranked greater
than 100,000, the sales ranks are updated once a month (Amazon.com 2000). (p. 346)
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