Students Say Tablets Will Transform College, Though Most Don’t Own Tablets

May 25, 2011, 12:01 am

More than two-thirds of a large group of college students say that tablet computers will change the way students learn, according to survey results released today. The Pearson Foundation sponsored the survey of 1,214 college students, as well as 200 high-school seniors who are heading to college, and found overwhelming interest in the devices.

Most of the students were not speaking from experience: Only 7 percent of the college students and 4 percent of the high school seniors owned one. Still, 69 percent of the college students said that tablets will transform higher education, and 48 percent said tablets will replace textbooks—at least as we currently understand textbooks—within the next five years. The survey was conducted for the foundation this March by Harris Interactive, which weighted the sample so it was representative of the American college population in terms of income, ethnicity, geography, and other factors.

As for the actual tablet owners in the survey, 73 percent said they liked digital formats more than print for reading textbooks. Only 32 percent of nonowners felt the same way. But, over all, the survey group was excited about reading digital textbooks.

That attitude may change once they try to study with tablets for an exam. Several pilot projects with tablets have found that students are frustrated with the difficulties in adding notes to digital books. But they still liked the machines. In the Pearson survey, nearly 20 percent of college students said they intend to buy a tablet in the next six months.

This entry was posted in Gadgets, Publishing. Bookmark the permalink.

E-mail

richardtaborgreene

This is like the 90% of psychology based on experiments done on college students—asking the ignorant to predict the future is safe—their errors will be about as error-ful as others’ errors. Safe and ineffective—an ad slogan
http://www.facebook.com/edremy Eric Remy

I’m not seeing all that many students with tablets at our school. If they want to study, they bring their laptop with a real keyboard and the applications they need to run for their class. If they are doing social things, they have a smartphone that they can use for text/email/facebook. I’m honestly not sure of the market for a device that’s too big for a pocket but not as good as a laptop for actual work. They might have a bunch in their rooms I don’t notice, but I’ve seen a lot more faculty and staff with them than students.

Etextbooks are the obvious market, but the publishers just aren’t there
yet, both in the number of titles and the licensing programs.
catlkelley

I see a lot of potential applications for tablets. While a lot of the “way cool” educational apps (such as interactive anatomy) are also available on PCs, they become a lot more intimate on the tablet. They also become a lot more portable on a tablet, thus opening up their use in the classroom pretty significantly. However, somebody has to develop those apps, and as such we need a really good dialogue between the disciplines and the people with the wherewithal to create the apps. I’d say “watch this space.” Bear in mind that any app has a limited shelf life however. You need to commit to continuous development and support.

As to books – well, yeah sure. It can be done, and it can be done better than is currently the case. To work really well, a textbook app needs to feel very natural to the student and allow NATURAL (i.e. pen/stylus-based) marginal note-taking. The electronic format would allow some other cool things, but it should be easy to turn them off and they should “get out of the way” when not wanted. Still, I see books as a pretty trivial use for the device. The biggest advantage is our student’s chiropractor bills will be reduced in the long term, as they will substantially lighten their backpacks. Other than that … meh. I am ready to be convinced but am not convinced yet.

For other more interactive purposes, there are a number of advantages of a tablet over a smartphone or laptop. In the classroom, it is way less “in the way” than a laptop. It turns on immediately – no boot-up time. It lays flat on the table, which means that students can still look at each other & at the instructor. It is large enough to take notes on … assuming that the apps are developed to support this, and once again I think pen-based note-taking is critical. Smartphones are just too small for this. I think we are only now beginning to grasp what tablets can bring to education.

But I hope nobody starts thinking about these as “magic bullets” as they did with laptops “back in the day.” They are just one more tool that may be useful in some disciplines.

As to whether or not kids will go for them … my sample of one (the young teenager who lives in my house) suggests “yes.” Of course my kid may not be typical.
RWEJD

Tablets will come as a result of large-scale deployment driven by campus CIO’s. Just think about the economies brought: textbooks; meal and room information; college newspaper; teaching/learning apps (including games, simulations, assessments), etc. etc. The economies of scale are baked in – what’s missing is content. Also, look for phones to eventually replace tablets, because flexible plastic ePaper substrates are not just beginning to appear – i.e. imagine a phone that plugs into a folding piece of ePaper. There are already industrial design prototypes of this kind of device from Sony. btw, content is now a commodity; what you wrap around the content is what people are going to pay for.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/cshunt312 Courtney Hunt

Folks may be interested in the results of a related poll (n = 550+) I recently conducted on people’s reading “device” preferences (paper or digital). Here’s a link to the blog post that contains the results (including 25 pages of comments):

http://tiny.cc/SMinOrgsBookPollFinal
electronicmuse

Always looking for a mechanistic way out . . .

Study!
http://twitter.com/AmerJustice American Justice

It’s hard enough to get students to read and this would make it easier? High impact experiences help get students to read. Let’s not let industry and government dumb them down further.
Ranger211

Academic activity and assessment– and therefore grades, degrees, and future earning potential (i.e., influence)– are becoming defined by the toys: who can afford and know how to use them. Toys=access=data=power. If you think that’s not true, you haven’t been in a college classroom and observed the palpable disdain exuded by those with the toys toward those (including teachers) without. Nor the confusion and frustration from the toyless who sense, rightly, that they’re at a disadvantage and already “behind”. Nor the unease of educators who are knowledgeable and effective FTF teachers, but being supplanted by technocrats.
emschles

Adding notes and tracking those notes in digital books ….http://youtu.be/uN03s33e6zM
electronicmuse

The disdain is created by marketers, because they have something to sell. Have you seen the one where a foolish-looking individual is chided for being “the last to know?” ‘Course, it’s about the timing of a “flash mob,” and nobody defined what the benefit of “knowing” about this would be, but evidently “to be in the know” is the all-important thing. All the people in the ad surrounding this “ignoramus” give him the glare . . .

Phooey!
bbaylis

What high impact experiences are your proposing? Are you saying reading itself is a high impact experience? For you it might be. For many of these students, it isn’t.

Is it better to read romance novels and pulp fiction because they are “real books” or Aristotle, Plato and Consfuscious on a kindle?

WHy is it easier to get many students interested in Kindles? It fits more closely with their experiences. They don’t have real books in their homes and their experiences with books in primary and secondary schools were not memorable in a good sense. Mike Rose in his autobiographic book, “Lives on teh Boundary” admitted that when he got to college, he didn’t read because he didn’t know how to read. He had to be tuaght how to read. He wasn’t saying that didn’t understand the words, he was saying that he didn’t know how to extract ideas from those words. He learned Shakespeare from an instructor who prepared study guides related to every reading, for which students had to write out answers nad turn in At the end of the semester, Mr. Rose found that not only did he learn Shakespeare, he learned how to prepare study guides for himself, in other words, he learned how to read. Mr. Rose also admitted that not every student had the same experience or found the same joy in reading that he had found.

Over two centuries ago, Conufscious said, “I hear, I forget; I see I remember; I do, I know. In modern life, we could change this quote to “I read or hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do , I know. The primary and secondary teachers are playing to the strengths of the students, and slowly helping them overcome their weaknesses. They are not focusing on thei studnets’ weaknesses and losing them along the way. THe problem may be that the students are not as far as long the path as we would like them to be.

I have always said that if I have accepted a student into the college, I have a responsiblity to assess that student fairly and if he or she doesn’t meet the standards, the college, i.e., me, has a responsibility to help that student develop the knowledge and skills necessary to meet the standards. I used that same philosophy when I hired faculty. Assessment and development are two sides of the same coin.