Dive Brief:
- More than 30 colleges have partnered with Pearson to get students more affordable digital learning materials, delivered on the first day of class.
- In announcing the partnerships, Pearson said schools will be using a variety of delivery models, most going through the campus bookstore, and once students have digital materials, faculty have ways to track their learning that wasn’t possible with traditional textbooks.
- Officials at the University of California-Davis, which launched a digital delivery service in 2015, said it has been “game-changing,” and both faculty and students have been positive about universal access to all course materials on the first day of class, without anyone even having to visit the bookstore.
Dive Insight:
While 86% of faculty respondents in a Campus Computing Project survey about digital course materials said cost is an important element of their textbook selection decision, fewer than half reported strong support of digital course materials themselves, or their usefulness in the classroom. Chief information officers almost universally see digital course materials as a positive, but the instructors that have to select them are more cautious. Key to CIO decision-making may be that only 44% of respondents agreed students preferred digital course materials. Faculty also report having trouble finding high-quality digital course materials, though finding any new textbook is always a challenge.