The Future of Learning

With e-books’ increasing popularity in education and the fact that traditional textbooks are still prevalent, one must wonder what today’s student truly wants when it comes to learning.

Less than 17 percent of community college students found library e-book collections useful or very useful, according to The Survey of American College Students: Student Use of Library E-Book Collections, which also found that the middle to upper-middle level college (as far as SAT acceptance scores are concerned) accounted for the highest percentage of e-book frequent users.

With the Amazon Kindle being rejected by college students as an e-book reader, and with no Kindle being used in university classrooms until support for the blind is added, Cloudave.com contributor Dave Morrill asks, “What device or system is going to truly work for busy students who want to use ebooks…?”

Perhaps it’s more of a system than either e-books or textbooks — one that meshes an e-book option with a traditional book with online resources all for one course.

Stephanie Cormier, a student at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Charlton College of Business, uses a textbook that also has e-book and online components. She only uses this solution for her Principles of Marketing course, but hopes she’ll get to use them more in future classes. In addition to this solution’s reasonable price, Cormier said she likes the flexibility.

“They offer interactive quizzes, flash cards and other tools that I find very useful on the days prior to an exam,” she said. “Overall, these books are just targeted much more toward today’s generation of college students who are taking on more and more.”
  
According to a study conducted by Cengage Learning, when it comes to reading, about 80 percent of students still prefer an actual book  even though they're running around with their technology devices.

“When it comes to studying, about another 10 percent beyond that see a digital device as having a purpose,” said Neil Marquardt, who developed a text/e-book and online solution for the company. “As publishers across the industry, we need to make the e-book experience better. As those notions converge, we’ve piloted a few e-books embedded within online materials. We’re tracking students — are they saying they want it or are they saying they want and actually use it?”

This is the ultimate question: Why create learning tools that students don’t really want? If a student is learning in a way that best suits them — and has multiple learning methods available to them for one subject — aren’t they more apt to engage, and therefore learn?