Why course books?

I probably shouldn't ask this question since I've just been hired to write one...
However, the question does get asked by students a lot: "WHY do we have to do this?  Can't we do something interesting for a change?"

It gets worse with exam-prep books which are exactly what they sound like: you have to do the book so you can pass the exam which proves that you know what was in the book.  It's a bit of a stupid circle, isn't it?

So the first thing we need to face is the idea that a coursebook isn't there to help the student learn, it's there to support the teacher.  It helps the teacher know what to teach next and it helps her to support the assumption that "they know this material", whatever that means. 

It also helps to standardize the course to the extent that a teacher can tell her boss "we've completed 3 units so far".  In this vast system that we call education, I suppose there is some comfort in the idea that all children of a given age are turning pages at exactly the same pace all over the country.  It's comforting if your aim is conformity, as opposed to, say, actual learning.

It seems, then, that we won't be getting away from coursebooks for a while.  So how can we take them and make them more educational in the sense of wringing more real learning from them?

First, we can make it more interactive.  From jigsaw readings to whistle-gap dictations, we can have the students working together by re-envisioning the basic exercises as pair-work puzzles.

Second, we can actually analyse and recreate the tasks.  It isn't easy to write a good gap-fill or multiple choice, and seeing why that is makes for a far deeper level of understanding.  Plus it's fun to make questions to see if your classmates, or the class next door, can actually answer them.  It's even nicer to create workbooks for underpriviledged kids.

Third, we can break out of the workbook-test cycle completely by designing projects based on the coursebook material that are relevant in real life.  This is where social media can be used to showcase the work beyond the classroom.