Oceans of Digital Content

Today, we’re sharing some information from the 2012 eLcc (eLearning Consortium of Colorado) conference last week!

Donna Hall, CCCOnline Instructional Design Team Coordinator, and Karen Kaemmerling, CCCOnline Social Science Associate Dean, presented “Charting Our Way through Oceans of Digital Content” at the eLCC conference.

In this presentation, Donna and Karen highlighted the lessons learned as CCCOnline has moved 39% of the courses to a digital content, e-book or open content, model. Along the way, CCCOnline staff has fought for ADA compliant materials that are easy to access and include interactive or value-added pieces. Slowly, students, instructors, and the online learning community have become more accepting of digital content courses, especially with single sign-on access to the materials. However, an institution should be prepared to meet technical support problems for students and provide training to instructors on how the digital materials are accessed and how they work.

We have student survey data starting in 2008 for digital content courses. The surveys indicates that 75% of those students taking the survey do most of their reading online and 70% of them do not purchase the hard copy of the text. Some preliminary data on retention and pass rates of students in CCCOnline digital courses versus non-digital courses do not show any significant difference in overall student performance.

While there may still be some disadvantages to the e-book model, such as needing internet connection to access the content and not having a book to “hold,” most of our digital content courses also have a black and white hard copy option. Using digital materials usually helps save students money, provides additional learning tools such as videos, and ensures students have access to the course text at the beginning of the course. Additionally, using e-books allows the academic team to determine when is the best time to update to a new edition of a text rather than redeveloping a course every year for a new edition.

Here’s an article for further reading:
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2236/ebook-reading-print-books-tablets-ereaders
(from the Pew Research Center: “The Rise of E-Readers” – 4/4/12)

Feel free to let us know in the CCCOnline Community: what are your thoughts about e-books and e-readers?