With membership in TAA, you are not alone. You become part of a diverse community of textbook and academic authors with similar interests and goals. We are pleased to announce the addition of 68 new TAA members who joined us in December 2021.
Feedback on student work: a sinkhole or an opportunity – Finding time to write
Students expect and need feedback on their work. The basic goal of feedback is to enhance student learning. An anomaly of feedback is that more is not necessarily better. Research tells us that students may not even read your copious feedback (sigh) and may not understand what to do with statements like, “cite more references” or “this is confusing”. However, giving a judicious amount of feedback in a timely manner will make a difference in student learning. The purpose of this article is to describe how to refine, clarify, streamline, and improve your feedback practices with an eye toward spending less time on the task.
Member Spotlight: Edward S. Neukrug
TAA Member Edward S. Neukrug is Chair of the Department of Counseling and Human Services at Old Dominion University. His latest book is Contemporary Theories of Counseling and Psychotherapy. He is currently working on a new book, Introduction to Clinical Mental Health Counseling.
Five chances to reset the terms of your book contract (part 2)
In Part 1 of this article (published in the summer edition of the TAA newsletter), we wrote about the imbalance in negotiating leverage between an author and his/her publisher early in the author’s publishing career. And we noted that there would be opportunities later for an author to retake some of the ground lost in those early negotiations. In particular, we wrote about two of these opportunities:
1) Your publisher calls for work to begin on a new edition and sends an amendment to your contract to memorialize this . . . with a few additional “updates”.
Member Spotlight: Rick Mullins
TAA Member Rick Mullins, Professor of Chemistry at Xavier University, Department of Chemistry. He just published his first book, Organic Chemistry: A Learner-Centered Approach. He is currently working on creating solved assessment YouTube videos to accompany the textbook.
Collaborating across differences: Build writing relationships with co-author agreements
I had a conversation with a senior colleague recently about the purpose and value of co-author agreements in collaborative writing projects. He and I talk regularly about research and writing but had not touched on the nature of “agreements” in collaborations. He has built his career in a scientific field where co-authors are the norm, and the majority of his publications included graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, or government agency researchers as collaborators.