In a quest for continuous improvement, we’re having a think about our study guides. Most authors have their documents online for students, be it PDFs (mostly) or word docs.. what the students do with those documents, I’m not entirely sure, and as far as I know, there’s no stats or research that might answer that question.
Even the stats for the eStudyGuide pages (discussed in earlier post – taking the xml from indesign to make a web front end for the study guides) don’t indicate any trend, the stats only show that people are looking at the front end, from where, for how long etc. Actually, there’s a possible answer there, I wonder if there’s any server stats on the PDFs, would the stats indicate how long the document is open in the browser, or would the stats just record the hit? I’ll have to find out. There’s got to be some data we can look at to know more about usage.
In the mean time, tell me what you would do with a PDF study guide if you were studying:
So, anyway, back to the point of this, what is really the best way to serve up the documents online? If students are indeed reading on screen, perhaps we should put some time into looking at a better way to present it all, Adobe Digital Editions for instance might be a winner. Like Acrobat Reader, its a free program, but it’s for managing and viewing eBooks. Students would be able to manage and read all their study guides on their computer (making them more convenient, mobile, and so on), plus, the epub format would be easy as to spit out of InDesign (what our study guides are created in).
rolley 