Welcome to zyBooks! We hope you will find adopting zyBooks helps your students succeed, and helps you be more efficient and have more fun teaching.
Basics
- Adopt a zyBook from our catalog, yielding a unique zyBook and code.
- Tell students their textbook is a zyBook, and give them your class' unique zyBook code.
- No need to do anything else; you can teach as you always have, knowing your students have a much better “book”. For even better results, read on.
Recommended
- Assign points in your syllabus for activity completion. Participation Activities (PAs) are like “reading”, and Challenge Activities (CAs, if present) are like auto-graded “homework”. Studies show 5%-10% of course points for each works well.
- Make PAs due before lectures to encourage student engagement and to free you from covering all topics. You can focus on key concepts, demonstrate examples, allow student group work (“flip”), etc.
- No need to set up assignments; just announce due dates, then download activity reports (csv files) anytime after due dates and upload the csv to your gradebook.
- Make CAs (if present) due end of week.
- Configure the zyBook to match your syllabus. One chapter per week is common. Set some sections to optional, and move some to unused or to later chapters. Configure mode allows you to have a custom ordering to match your teaching style.
More features
- Add notes in any section. Instructors use notes to make announcements; comment on our content; provide links to more resources like videos, articles, or slides; and more.
- Try presentation mode. Many instructors use zyBooks as an instructional tool and project it in class, playing the animations, viewing the figures, using the coding windows, and more. Our article, Do you have presentation slides? goes even further by converting a section to look like a PowerPoint slide.
- Search. Using our content explorer, search any zyBook for key terms in section titles, captions, definitions, and more. See what kinds of activities are available in your zyBook and where you can find them.
- zyLabs: If enabled for your zyBook (additional cost), create your own auto-graded programming assignments in just minutes, via the web; no special skills are needed.
- Instructor-created sections: Write a few of your own sections to supplement ours.
See our About zyBooks article for more info.