To their detriment, earlier digital textbooks attempted to simply recreate the experience of print learning materials. Today’s digital textbooks, however, foreground the features that most engage students. Many of the usability issues students and faculty were worried about a decade ago have also been improved upon. Students can instantly search for keywords and concepts. They can easily highlight important passages and take in-depth and interactive notes. Images and text are flowable — meaning they can be resized and read on a large number of devices — and imbued with text-to-speech capabilities, addressing accessibility needs for a wide range of learners.
Digital materials also provide faculty with far greater insights into how their students learn. The analytics from digital textbooks allow faculty to have better visibility into student engagement, which means they can intervene in real time and respond to students’ struggles earlier and with a deeper understanding of where the difficulties lie. Rather than as a mere alternative for physical texts, faculty may begin to view them as an extension of their own teaching practice — as digital assistants that can help and guide students and make the experience of learning more engaging and interactive.
Digital course materials have come a long way from what many still envision. They are more interactive, responsive, and loaded with features to help both students and instructors. Indeed, research is starting to show that student engagement increases and course success rates increase, especially among historically underserved populations, when they use digital learning materials.
Despite the fact that the adoption of digital course materials is accelerating, higher education appears to still be just scratching the surface in terms of achieving the materials’ full potential. The ubiquity of digital content and resources is changing the way we think about access to information and the retention of knowledge. To be sure, many key questions remain to be answered as we balance the increased use of digital resources with live instruction, hard-copy resources, project-based learning, and assessments, but long-standing apprehensions should not outweigh the need for exploration and innovation.
Far too many learners who could benefit from digital materials are missing out. We cannot allow the increase in adoption during the pandemic to become a footnote in the story of digital course materials. Faculty have the opportunity to open their minds to the possibilities of these powerful learning tools — and to encourage their students to do the same.
Raj Kaji is the CEO of the online course materials platform Akademos.
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