The results of our small sample survey highlights most students haven’t experienced a multimedia, interactive intensive designed eBook.
The Elevate Team would like to work with specific subject areas that they believe will be more engaged with multimedia eBooks, for students that are less classroom based.
An emerging idea from this work is there is a clear need for text intensive ebooks which support face to face teaching and learning models. There is also a niche area around creating more multimedia rich and interactive intensive eBooks. This is likely to be where students are learning off campus.
The recommendations are:
- Work with a specific course team who have a large amount of off campus learning to explore the opportunities of creating eBooks
- Research and test eBook authoring tools
- Develop a more enhanced eBook as a prototype for effective multimedia and interactivity intensive learning designs
Background
The aim of this short research project is to better understand eBooks from the students’ perspective. In particular, what do students think an eBook is and what role does it have in their learning?
There are a number of related discussions at UCS around eBooks.
- IT Services are aiming to reduce printing costs at an institutional level. Part of this solution might be to provide course and programme handbooks as an eBook version.
- Library Services are a large owner of eBooks currently, there are many advantages to the Library owning eBooks compared to physical stock around space, budget and availability issues.
- The Elevate Team have been exploring effective learning design within interactive and multimedia elements for distance learning courses.
Before going ahead and dedicating a lot of time and resource developing new content, the team needed to find out how eBooks were currently perceived and if indeed there was a need for full blown highly interactive eBooks within the institution.
This report will hopefully answer these questions and help steer any developments in this area.
Methodology
The data was captured from a face to face interviews, based on a simple questionnaire. The results are available in Appendix 1. The data was collected on the 4th February, 2014, between 10.00 and 11.00 am, at the following locations within UCS Ipswich Campus;
- Library - Group work area
- Library - Ground floor breakout area
- Waterfront Building - 3rd floor informal learning zone
- Waterfront Building - 4th floor informal learning zone
Findings and discussion
Given the very small sample (n=20), and potential bias in the collection points it is evident the following findings are not statistically significant. Therefore, the findings are more of an indicator of trends and call for more research.
The gender breakdown was 90% (18) Female, and 10% (2) Male.
The discipline breakdown is below. With UCS being an institution that teaches face-to-face, the main source of teaching materials sits with the lecturer and the library. Looking at the subjects that the participants were studying, these are all very textual topics, these are shown below:
Subject
|
Frequency
|
English
|
3
|
History
|
3
|
Law
|
1
|
Early Childhood Studies
|
2
|
Psychology with ...
|
5
|
“... different subject areas exhibit much consistency in the usage, with between 40% and 60% of titles used in all of the subject collections. The one exception was Mathematics and Statistics where fewer than 30% of titles were used. This mirrors the e-journals usage in mathematics at the University which is lower than most other subjects. This may be a reflection that mathematicians read less text-based material than those in other disciplines, still prefer to read from printed sources, or need to read older sources that are not available online. “
Bucknell also goes onto investigate whether certain disciplines that require up-to-date research made use of the latest eBooks. The two disciplines that Bucknell investigated were Computer Science and Biomedical and Life Science.
“... fewer chapters were downloaded from older collections in Biomedical and Life Sciences but that there was little effect in Computer Science.“
This raises questions around the relationship between the discipline and the type and effectiveness of the eBook.
Have students heard of eBooks?
Overall the findings show that students are very aware of eBooks, all students that participated had heard of eBooks. Even though all students had heard of eBooks, a few had not used them. Those that had not heard of eBooks were also asked if they had used an eReader device, therefore ruling out the misunderstand that electronic versions of fiction are not eBooks.
How are they being used?
The use of eBooks is primarily driven by students’ study rather than a recreational activity. Nearly all students - 94% - answered that their use of eBooks was limited to their studies at UCS.
2) Was this eBook accessed for your course or was it a personal activity?
The reasons for this response becomes clearer when they were asked how they accessed eBooks.
3) How did you access it?
This is shown in some of the comments captured during the questions. The following extracts show some of the issues when accessing from a closed system due to copyright:
“Restriction on of number pages that can be downloaded/printed.”
“Access issues via ucs”
“login issues”
There was only a few mentions of students going outside of the Summons walled garden to search for other eBooks.
Following discussions with the Students’ Union it became clear that the representatives at the Council felt generally pleased with the eBooks that Library gave access to. The only issue that was mentioned was a concern regarding concurrent users and not being able to access when the student wanted to, due to another student already accessing that same eBook.
The Library have confirmed their current position regarding the licensing of eBooks, this is:
The number of users allowed is determined by which type of licence the Library buy at the point of purchase. The price for limited and unlimited concurrent users varies dramatically so it’s not possible to buy unlimited access for all eBooks and the librarians have to weigh up the cost against the number of people who are likely to need access.
The majority of eBooks at UCS are on an unlimited access licence, however there are some older titles that were purchased from MyiLibrary that only allow one person to access at a time. Those older titles are being replaced on an ongoing basis. Other publishers have different licences and some UCS eBooks are on a three user licence.
Features and FunctionalityOne of the keys questions that the Elevate Team wanted answered was “What features did the eBook have?”. This was a key driver to whether the team would look at creating dynamic, interactive eBooks.
4) What features did it have?
We can infer from the above that the majority of students haven’t had any experience of using an interactive eBook with embedded multimedia. Conversations afterwards with the students seemed to highlight the fact that students were happy with simple plain text.
However, this could be a result of the delivery method, Summons, being a tool which serves up mostly print to text eBooks rather than eBooks which have been crafted with multimedia or interactivity in mind.
Were eBooks useful?Given the students use of eBooks was not extensive or by any means interactive, the majority of students interviewed still thought that their use of eBooks had been useful. Keywords that were repeated by students during our survey were:
- Accessible
- Cheap
- Quick and easy
- Wider range
A few students felt that they preferred the text only eBook and noted, as they felt images and other multimedia may make their minds wander from the meaning of the text.
Chen (2012) looked into some pilot projects universities adopted to change their delivery models of eBooks and noted,
“some of those pilot projects, however, shows that many students find the e-textbooks “clumsy” and prefer print.” Chen, (2012).
The article does go on to raise questions around the need for academics to ‘buy-in’ to these schemes, and use the interactive features if students perceive them as being effective.
What is happening elsewhere?
Whilst gathering information about how other UK HEIs were using eBooks, two themes emerge; Firstly, significant work around Library adoption of eBooks, such as JISC’s “National e-books observatory project” backing a very library orientated view.
The other common focus is on the creation of eBooks and concentrating on the tools and functionality of eBooks. Both the University of Nottingham and Manchester University highlight their outcomes of the authoring process by providing case studies via JISC’s “The challenge of ebooks in academic institutions” project.
The more specific information regarding the evaluation of a wider institution rollout with a students perspective of their requirements.
An emerging idea from this work is there is a clear need for text intensive ebooks which support face to face teaching and learning models. There is also a niche area around creating more multimedia rich and interactive intensive eBooks. This is likely to be where students are learning off campus.
Recommendations
The recommendations are:
Chen, A. (2012) Students Find E-Textbooks ‘Clumsy’ and Don’t Use Their Interactive Features http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/students-find-e-textbooks-clumsy-and-dont-use-their-interactive-features/39082 (Accessed: 5 February, 2014)
Bucknell, T. (2010) The ‘big deal’ approach to acquiring e-books: a usage-based study http://research-archive.liv.ac.uk/1361/1/1361.pdf (Accessed: 5 February, 2014)
The recommendations are:
- Work with a specific course team who have a large amount of off campus learning to explore the opportunities of creating eBooks
- Research and test eBook authoring tools
- Develop a more enhanced eBook as a prototype for effective multimedia and interactivity intensive learning designs
Chen, A. (2012) Students Find E-Textbooks ‘Clumsy’ and Don’t Use Their Interactive Features http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/students-find-e-textbooks-clumsy-and-dont-use-their-interactive-features/39082 (Accessed: 5 February, 2014)
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