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Case Study
NYU College of Dentistry Takes Textbooks Online
6/13/2007
Today's students have little patience for trudging to the library and researching a question on paper. For better or worse, they're far more likely to jump online and use tools like Google and Wikipedia to try to find answers quickly.For the New York University College of Dentistry, battling that tendency--since unapproved online sources are often poor substitutes for peer-reviewed textbooks--is a challenge. Fighting fire with fire, the school has gradually worked to make all of the reference materials a student needs to complete a degree, from textbooks to lecture material, available online. It now has some 80 textbooks accessible through a website for reference or download, along with a wealth of other content.
The materials are submitted yearly to a company called VitalSource Technologies, which creates online versions of the content for the college in its Bookshelf product. The electronic textbooks are complete with hypertext links to references and the ability to search, print, highlight, organize, and add "sticky" notes.
Students are also given, through VitalSource, access to the NYU College of Dentistry library, and to other faculty-reviewed and -approved items.
Over the last seven years of working with VitalSource, the College of Dentistry, located in the heart of New York City, has created a vast digital library of textbooks, papers, lectures, and other internal and externally produced scholarly reference materials, all available to its students and faculty through VitalSource. For reference, a graduating student retains access to content that was current during his or her final year of school.
As use of the Internet has evolved, so has student use of Bookshelf, according to Leila Jahangiri, chair of the Department of Prosthodontics at NYU. "Students' experience with computers is changing," she said. When the e-textbook program was first introduced, printing out material to read, study, highlight, and retain was much more common. Today, she said she sees little of that. "Students are now accessing all their course materials on Bookshelf." Faculty members, she said, now tend to be the ones printing out content much more often than students.
Access and Integration
The easy access to online materials helps counter students' tendencies to go online to the general Internet for every answer, Jahangiri said. "At an age when students are relying heavily on technology to access materials, they may end up with a totally wrong fact," she said. "Wikipedia is a good example.... It's created by lay people; it has lots of [errors]. It is in no way a peer-reviewed source."
With VitalSource, dentistry students appreciate the immediate access to materials, Jahangiri said. "Students today love [Bookshelf] in terms of immediate access to the materials, anytime, anywhere. This generation wants everything now. They're not into going to a library across the street or down the hall, searching for a textbook. They want it at their fingertips."
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