Measuring Student Use of Electronic Books John Messing

Policy documents within Charles Sturt University (CSU) have recommended the change from the traditional print based method to electronic delivery of instructional material by the year 2000. While there is some discussion in the literature of the viability of electronic books, much of it is speculative. It appears that within the upper management levels of CSU at least, it is taken for granted that electronic delivery of educational materials is a more desirable alternative than the present arrangements. In 1993 the first electronic book was used at CSU to replace printed teaching materials. The results of a pilot study led to modifications and a more extensive study in 1995, of how students actually use these teaching materials. This paper considers issues for the design of electronic books as teaching materials in the light of student use, including the problem of how such use can be measured. While not all of the data have been analysed, the results of the pilot study as well as a preliminary analysis have important implications for organisations such as CSU that are making plans for electronic delivery of instructional material. The discussion focusses on the particular project in question but results could easily be generalised to other situations such as using the World Wide Web and electronic publishing as a whole