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.
