An ACE instructor can author his or her own textbook within ACE. To author a new textbook or to continue to author an existing one, an instructor presses the Textbooks button. A menu of all the existing textbooks in ACE appears.
Each ACE textbook is assigned to an owner, i.e., the instructor who first created it. The owner of a textbook may designate coauthors, who may also modify the ACE textbook.
An instructor may modify an existing textbook even if she is neither an owner nor a designated coauthor. In this case, ACE makes a copy of the textbook and makes her the owner of the copy. Thereafter, her copy and the original are independent of one another.
An ACE textbook consists of chapters, each of which contains any number of pieces of content. Content may take many forms:
As part of the authoring process, an author may move pieces of content within a chapter or from one chapter to another. An author may also establish hyperlinks within and between chapters.
The instructor of a course may assign any ACE textbook to a particular ACE course. In that case, the students in that course will be able to read the ACE textbook and work ACE questions that have been embedded in it. In the case of R-group questions and numeric questions with variables, ACE does not permanently assign instantiated R groups or values to students who work those questions in the textbook; in other words, a student will see a different version of the question each time he or she works it.