The Learning Skills Council/JISC funded e-books for FE project provides every Further Education (FE) college in the UK with access to 3000 e-books for 5 years. As a result FE students have access to a digital library 24 hours a day, 7 days a week under unlimited, simultaneous user access, meaning that unlike the print world, a text book will never be out of stock. E-books are of particular benefit to distance learners, readers with print related disabilities, part time students or learners who simply prefer not to go to the campus to read.
The 3,000 e-books have been selected to meet the needs of further education students and support Diplomas, GCSE's, NVQ's/SVQ's, A levels, Scottish Highers, Foundations Degrees and more. Many of the textbook titles, which include vocational and academic titles by leading FE publishers, have been converted into e-format especially for the project. The FE community contributed to the task of evaluating the bids received and FE colleges cast around 80,000 votes. If each library had to buy 1 copy of the e-books, in print, the cost for each institution would be £116,879.10.
What you can do with the e-books
The project is about taking library resources out of the library into places where students and teachers can access and use them in their learning and teaching.
The e-books are available under the terms of the JISC Model Licence for e-books and hosted via the ebrary interface meaning that teachers and students can copy and paste parts into teaching and learning materials, VLEs, coursepacks, print and more.
Funding has been secured to acquire additional titles to add to the collection in key vocational areas, including titles to support the new diplomas. These e-textbooks will be freely available to colleges from April.
Promoting and Signposting the Collection
The JISC National e-books Observatory Project student surveys reported that students often showed little understanding of the distinction between the e-resources provided through their own institution or via the open web. The project is an ideal opportunity to raise the profile of your college and extend the variety of places where your students can learn; however, since there are numerous ways of discovering and accessing e-books teachers, VLE administrators, IT and library staff need to work together to offer a clear route to content.
JISC Collections has created a range of tools to assist colleges in making best use of the e-books collection including video exemplars to demonstrate how the collection can be used in Moodle to deliver courses, including English, Travel and Tourism and National Diploma in Sports Science.
What colleges said about the collection
“I think the extended e-book collection is a real asset to our learning provision and it is nice to have something to feel proud about during inductions.”
Nona Davies, Study Centre Assistant
“Ealing, Hammersmith and West London college has progressively been implementing e-books into many of its courses over the last 2-3 years. The college feels that these have added immensely to the flexibility of its course provision and delivery.”
Tristan Callaghan Ealing, Hammersmith and West London college
For more information about the collection please visit http://fe.jiscebooksproject.org/ or www.jisc-collections.ac.uk. Please contact Anna Vernon a.vernon@jisc.ac.uk for further information about the project.
Anna Vernon
JISC
a.vernon@jisc.ac.uk
