Improving Learning with eTextbooks

Etextbooks offer the potential to change the way faculty teach and students learn. One approach to providing etextbooks enables faculty to custom tailor traditional "flat" paper textbooks from major publishers by embedding videos and annotating them with comments. We conducted a lab study in which participants read a chapter in a computer networking book either in paper form, or using an etext system with annotations and a video embedded by the faculty member teaching the course using the book. We found that participants who used the etexts scored significantly higher on a test, the effect size was medium (.55). Interesting, participants did not recognize that they learned more and perceived that the paper book better met their learning needs.