FEATURE Education information
unwilling to invest further in educational materials such as books,’ agreed Cox of Taylor & Francis.
This is a trend that Stuart Webster, technology solutions manager at Cengage, is also seeing. ‘In a price sensitive market, students see increased value in content provided by their institution either via the library or as a course resource. Increasingly students are challenging libraries to deliver content and tools that are relevant to them,’ he said.
In 2011 the psychology department of the
UK’s University of Plymouth struck a deal with Cengage to enable the department
Student feedback
to provide students with free access to 12 e-textbooks. The university has since begun working with Pearson on a similar agreement. Palgrave Macmillan Higher Education is also keeping a close eye on this area. As the editorial and digital development team told Research Information, ‘Increasingly, since the introduction of student fees, they expect the core information sources to be provided by their institution, and to be disseminated in a joined up way through the VLE. More universities are using VLEs, often including deep links that take students to their own copy of a textbook, complete with the ability to access their own notes.
Flexible business models allow universities to purchase core materials, such as the Palgrave Skills4StudyCampus resource, on behalf of their students and to integrate it into their VLE so that students can benefit from a single sign on.
Custom content
Another trend that people are seeing with the advent of widespread digital content is the demand for custom content.
‘Most publishers offer some type of custom publishing. Lecturers can look at a range of existing resources and choose, perhaps, a chapter from one thing and video from another. We are doing this more and more and custom products have become a much stronger offering for universities,’ observed Shoman of SAGE.
SAGE is also working with some of the UK’s new Q Step centres – centres of excellence in teaching quantitative methods in social sciences that are being launched at 15 universities, funded by HEFCE, ESRC and the Nuffield Foundation. Shoman explained that, among other things, the company is discussing the production of custom publications for the new courses that will start in September. ‘One
of SAGE’s key and founding
From left, Lucy Hensher, Lenart Celar and Eva Brittin-Snell
An interesting session at the recent UKSG conference featured three undergraduate students from the UK’s University of Sussex. The three students, all first years studying different social sciences degree courses, are working with SAGE to feed back on their experiences of using course resources. Even among the three who spoke at the meeting, it was possible to see both the lasting appeal of print and the challenges of generalising.
Eva Brittin-Snell who is studying international relations, for example, stated her clear preference: ‘I use e-books as a back-up. I prefer printed. Staring at a screen, getting distracted by Facebook, it’s just not the same, and with e-books you lose the serendipity of finding related books by browsing shelves.’
20 Research Information JUNE/JULY 2014
She added that she also prefers accessing study materials through her VLE to e-books, but that print books still win for her. Geography student Lucy Hensher takes a mixed approach: ‘Just using e-books might be hard for my course but l do read some on my Kindle. Having the availability of books is key when it’s exam time,’ she said. Meanwhile Lenart Celar, who is studying psychology, was pragmatic in his attitude: ‘If l didn’t have access to library print books I’d use the e-books rather than pay.’
The students were mainly positive about the use of online quizzes in their courses, although one noted that there had been problems in the quizzes on a recent module, which stopped them working properly. The students blog about their experiences at
blogs.lib.Sussex.ac.uk/sagestudentsblog.
disciplines is within the field of research methods, and these partnerships are part of SAGE’s shared commitment, both with industry bodies and universities themselves to help facilitate change in both the teaching of and support of quantitative methods in the UK,’ she said.
Assisting interaction
Interactive elements of digital content are also attracting attention more today. ‘We remember and intuitively understand more of what we learn when we learn actively. Interactive pedagogy is at its most useful not when it’s there for interest, variety or as a selling point but when it fundamentally reflects the logic of your content. That’s when an activity makes sense to the person doing it,’ explain the Palgrave team. ‘If you provide interactive features for the sake of being interactive, you’ll find that people would rather have a straightforward page of well-formatted text. Far better to provide learners with an exercise that chunks information naturally and progresses in a similar way to the processes they are learning about. It’s much more instructive and satisfying. Interaction design will continue to improve to make greater use of touchscreen devices,
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