Student Engagement with E-Texts: What the Data Tell Us | EDUCAUSE Review

Key Takeaways

• This case study of Indiana University's e-text initiative reports on students' actual use of and engagement with digital textbooks.
• In a typical semester, students read more in the first four weeks and less in later weeks except during major assessment times; in a typical week, most reading occurs between 5:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. from Monday to Thursday, indicating that students use e-texts mainly as a self-study resource.
• Highlighting was the markup feature most used by students, whereas use of the other interactive markup features (shared notes, questions, and answers) was minimal, perhaps because of students' lack of awareness of these features.
• Research found that higher engagement with e-texts (reading and highlighting) correlated with higher course grades.
  

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"This case study of Indiana University's e-text initiative reports on students' actual use of and engagement with digital textbooks. Research found that higher engagement with e-texts (reading and highlighting) correlated with higher course grades" by Serdar Abaci, PhD, educational research and evaluation specialist in Learning Technologies, University Information Technology Services, Indiana University, Bloomington, Joshua Quick, learning data analyst in Learning Technologies, University Information Technology Services, Indiana University, Bloomington and Anastasia S. Morrone, PhD, associate vice president, Learning Technologies, Indiana University and dean for IT, IUPUI.  
 

Photo: EDUCAUSE Review

Although cost savings is often cited as a key advantage of electronic textbooks (aka, e-textbooks or simply e-texts), e-texts also provide powerful markup and interaction tools. For these tools to improve student learning, however, their adoption is critically important.¹ This article focuses on the adoption and use of these tools and actual student reading data, which we consider understudied.² Examination of actual reading data as well as markup use might help identify effective study practices that improve learning. In addition, adoption and use data might provide better measures to test the effectiveness of interactive e-texts as learning support tools. For example, previous research found that use of bookmarking, total number of pages read, and total number of days spent reading predict final course grade.³

Indiana University, as one of the few higher education institutions in the United States with a university-wide e-textbook adoption initiative, has also been studying adoption and use of e-textbooks by instructors and students.⁴ In our previous EDUCAUSE Review article⁵ we presented IU's e-texts program based on pilot data and some insights from faculty use of e-texts. In this article, we present findings based on actual use data on the e-text reading platform by IU students and instructors over multiple semesters. 

The Indiana University e-texts program, which began in 2009, has four primary goals:

1. Drive down the cost of materials for students
2. Provide high-quality materials of choice
3. Enable new tools for teaching and learning
4. Shape the terms of sustainable models that work for students, faculty, and authors

These goals have served us well. The program has continued to grow every year, and we now have agreements with more than 25 publishers at substantially discounted prices. As shown in table 1, the numbers — across calendar years from 2012 (when the program went into production) through 2016 — show strong growth. Now that we are more than five years into the full implementation of the e-text program, we are in a position to assess the progress we have made in addressing key concerns raised by instructors and students regarding e-text adoption. 

Costs  
As noted, our agreements with publishers provide substantial cost savings for students. The formal calculation of the savings is the actual difference between the "print list price" and the negotiated IU e-text price for the publisher content. To date, student savings on textbooks amount to $21,673,338. However, we recognize that many students do not pay the full list price for paper textbooks when they purchase online, buy used copies, or recoup some of their costs when they resell their texts after the semester is over. In fact, an article from the New York Times highlights that actual student spending on course materials, including textbooks, was about half the actual cost of the textbooks and related course materials.⁶ Therefore, we divide the calculated savings by two and report that total as a more accurate representation of student savings. Consequently, we claim that students have saved about $11 million since IU's e-texts program started in spring 2012.

Printing
IU's e-texts program allows unlimited printing of textbook pages — up to 50 pages at a time, using the university's reading platform (Unizin Engage). According to page view records between the spring 2012 and spring 2016 semesters, 3,224 students from 251 courses (745 separate sections) printed over 130,000 pages of e-text (excluding multiple prints of the same page). In comparison, records show over 11 million distinct page view over the same time period. Therefore, paper-based reading constitutes only one percent of the total reading activity at IU. By comparison, there were 56,824 unique students in the system during this period. Thus, only five percent of the students chose to print from their e-texts.
 
In addition to printing through the e-text platform, students can purchase a print-on-demand (PoD) copy of an e-text for an additional fee. From fall 2012 until the end of spring 2016, our records show that 461 different students submitted 510 separate PoD requests, which varied from selected chapters of a book to a single complete book to multiple books or reading packages in one request. Some students requested paper copies more than once or requested multiple books at once, clearly having a strong preference for paper copies. Nevertheless, these students represent less than one percent of the total number of unique students (n = 52,763) active on the Engage platform during the same time period. 
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Source: EDUCAUSE Review