08 June 2021 
Dave Sherwood, CEO BibliU
Blog written by BibliU - https://bibliu.com/
Last year, higher education institutions were blindsided by the global pandemic. With little notice, universities and academic libraries across the United Kingdom had to close their doors and limit their services to online. Yet, in the middle of great difficulty lies opportunity.
Challenged to meet the needs of students, academic leaders, faculty, and librarians innovated their approach to enabling learning, adopting new practices, processes, and technologies to facilitate student success. For many, this included innovating in their use of digital content.
Content digitisation is an essential learning and teaching strategy of future-looking institutions in the United Kingdom. Universities like Coventry University have partnered with BibliU to launch eTextbook programmes that provide access to core textbooks to students.
A digital content strategy is an excellent way to promote more equitable, effective, and efficient student learning outcomes. Here are 4 tangible ways that you can start planning your digital content strategy:
1. Pinpoint your desired outcome
Is your goal better retention rates? More enrollments? Higher completion rates? Better student learning outcomes? Better access to course materials?
Whatever it may be, your goal should drive how you approach planning a digital content strategy. Before you plan, determine what you would like most out of a digital content strategy and solution, then craft your strategy with that in mind.
2. Prioritise accessibility
Print textbooks can be costly, difficult to acquire, hard to provision, and impractical for students with multiple core readings. Universities often need the most cost-effective content delivery method to provide textbook access for more students.
Engage students who lack access to content, such as mature students who typically abstain from buying textbooks, students who can’t afford to purchase textbooks or distance learners who need a high-quality user experience. Implementing preventative measures, like digitally accessible content, helps students at crucial points in their learning journey and makes dropping out less likely.
3. Determine your universities most-used textbooks
Understanding which books are a top priority for academics and students is key to creating a scalable digital content strategy. Consult reading lists, library records, and academics to help determine which titles you should prioritise digitally. Often, core courses and courses with higher student enrollments have the highest textbook usage, so consider starting your digital content collection with titles from those courses.
4. Expand the range of content based on usage
Invest in a solution that can tap into the rich reserve of student learning data that you can collect and utilise to scale your strategy. Because students are the primary stakeholders in their education, you can use student data analytics to personalise and improve the student experience. Learning enablement platforms like BibliU provide digital content to students and academics and data insights into student usage, content effectiveness, and top titles.
Considering implementing a digital content strategy but don’t know where to start? We would be happy to show you how.
