Page 14 - Campus Technology, April/May 2017

MANAGING DIGITAL EDUCATIONAL CONTENT
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GAMECHANGER
thought they would get better grades with interactive textbooks. Students today spend most of their lives online, both academically and socially, “and most of their content is consumed online,” says Mike Hale, vice president of education in North America for e-textbook and digital content provider VitalSource.
Hale says when an institution adopts a campus-wide digital courseware program, even if it’s mandated by a dean or provost, students end up preferring digital. In fact, many inclusive-access programs allow students the opportunity to “opt-out” of the digital materials and less than eight percent of students are doing so. Additionally, Verba Software’s ConnectTM platform manages inclusive- access programs for college bookstores and allows students to opt back in after initially opting out. Colleges utilizing Verba’s Connect are seeing opt-out rates drop to around four percent.
Those numbers are driven largely by the fact that students using digital texts quickly realize the benefits, which include multi-device access and searchability. “Once they go digital, they don’t go back, because they’d lose the ability to search across all of their content, including highlights and notes,” says Hale.
RETHINKING HOW TECHNOLOGY IS USED IN EDUCATION
TODAY’S STUDENTS WERE RAISED ON DIGITAL ACCESS. THEY CLEARLY UNDERSTAND AND APPRECIATE THE ADVANTAGES OF DIGITAL COURSE MATERIALS, INCLUDING A LOWER COST, MOBILE AND MULTI-DEVICE ACCESS, SEARCHABILITY, AND INTERACTIVITY.
Those search capabilities include not just personal notes and highlights, but any shared content, including instructor notes. With inclusive-access programs, faculty gain the ability to guide students’ study within assigned course materials. They also gain powerful insights into student engagement. When all students have access to content on day one, on the same digital platform, instructors can see how students are interacting with course materials in ways that are impossible with print. This helps them intervene with students who aren’t engaging early and often.
There are numerous other advantages to rolling out a campus-wide digital courseware program. Cost is among the biggest. Just as the price of tuition has soared—it has more than doubled in the past 30 years—so too has the cost of textbooks. Students now spend an average of $1,200 a year on textbooks and supplies. That can equal 14 percent of tuition at an average four-year college or university, or an astounding 30 percent of tuition at a community college. In fact, the cost of learning materials has shot up by 86 percent over the past 10 years.
On the other hand, studies show students buying digital over paper texts can save from 20 to nearly 70 percent. Students are also open to having digital textbook fees folded into tuition. The recent Wakefield Research study found 77 percent of students are interested in paying for course materials as part of tuition costs.
Today’s students were raised on digital access. They clearly understand and appreciate the advantages of digital course materials, including a lower cost, mobile and multi-device access, searchability, and interactivity. As adoption rates increase and students demand educational solutions that appeal to digital natives, the future of digital courseware seems clear.
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | April/May 2017