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Case Study
NYU College of Dentistry Takes Textbooks Online
6/13/2007
At the beginning of the academic year, Jahangiri explained, every department in the College of Dentistry submits books or other content they would like to see added to VitalSource. The college began the program originally with textbooks only, but over time has gradually added faculty lecture materials, PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents, manuals, selected educational sites, and online access through VitalSource to the Waldmann Dental Library at NYU.
"Students who need to access electronic journals and various other materials that are in the library ... can just go online and click," Jahangiri said, to access materials through the VitalSource platform.
Students can download those textbooks they need and use regularly; to save space, others can simply be accessed online as needed. Essentially, students and faculty can create their own personal bookshelves each academic year, downloading the basic books required, along with other materials they might use often. Content, whether left online or downloaded to a personal computer, can be arranged in folders in VitalSource for accessibility.
The College of Dentistry uses Blackboard as its course management system; each course offered by the college has a Blackboard-created page with the course syllabus, then links to information that can be found in Bookshelf. A syllabus line describing a Monday lecture can contain a link directly to the chapter that will be referenced, along with the PowerPoint presentation itself and other internally produced material, all stored in Bookshelf.
"It's almost like having a library at home," Jahangiri said. "Students literally have everything at their fingertips."
e-Book Advantages
In many ways, using the e-books is faster and easier than printed texts. For example, clicking on a hyperlink reference in a textbook in VitalSource's patented e-book format takes the user to the full citation.
"If you're looking for an exam question [as an instructor] and you want to know where that information came from, or you're giving a lecture,... it will take you immediately to the end of the chapter," Jahangiri said.
Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of Bookshelf is the time savings for faculty in finding and pulling together lecture material. "As a faculty member, I love it," Jahangiri said. "We just can't do without it. I can put a lecture together in 20 minutes, with 30 or 40 slides. You can cut and paste any of the graphic elements in any of these libraries, instantaneously. And these are high-quality images."
Copyright is not a problem; VitalSource secures a copyright that allows unlimited use of material for academic purposes.
Jahangiri said the college is looking forward to a coming version of Bookshelf, due out from VitalSource this fall, that will support audio and video. That will allow students to download lectures to their computers, iPods, or other MP3- and video-capable devices.
Linda L. Briggs is a freelance writer based in San Diego, Calif.
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