The document discusses challenges universities face in selecting and providing core eTextbooks and how Talis can help. It outlines the current manual process for identifying textbooks, managing academic preferences, and lengthy negotiations with publishers. Talis can help by providing a workflow to simplify the selection process, identify digital availability and costs, and seamlessly provision content for students. This would help improve the student experience and support data-driven acquisition decisions. Plymouth University is working with Talis to develop additional functionality for core textbook selection and acquisition workflows.

1. Video Delivery Partner

3. Exploring eTextbooks
with Talis
Keji Adedeji
Product Manager

4. Why core eTextbooks?

5. Why core eTextbooks?
• Emerging one-to-one models of core text provision for students
• Small number of institutions involved at scale
• More institutions and faculties in pilots

6. Why core eTextbooks?
• Key differentiator and marketing for student acquisition
• No extra costs for student
• Improved student experience
• guaranteed access to core texts
• social inclusion by removing challenge for low income students
• potential to improve student retention
• Desire to improve teaching efficiency
• guaranteed access to core text for all students

7. Challenges

8. Academic selection process
• Identifying core texts & quantities across institution
• highly manual process
• Managing the academic selection process
• seeking responses
• dialog about preferences
• For academics
• lack of visibility across modules
• discovering and selecting alternatives
• time

9. Lack of inventory & price visibility
• Digital availability and cost is unknown
• Increases length of selection process as preferences may have to
change depending on availability and/or cost

10. Long and looping negotiation cycle
• Negotiations with numerous publishers
• Multiple exchanges of spreadsheets
• Lack of transparency

11. Provisioning content
• Effort to provision content to relevant point in VLE for students
• Ease of seamless access to content for students?
• Student awareness and use of content?

12. Understanding usage & demonstrating success
• Analysing and understanding usage data
• Highly manual, time intensive workflow
• especially when done at scale
• but is also a barrier to pilot

13. How we can help

14. Core textbooks
• Technology collaboration
• Vitalsource
• Development partners
• University of Manchester
• University of Plymouth
• Northumbria University

15. How we can help
• Support for academic selection process
• Workflow to simplify decision making & negotiation process
• Easily and quickly identify core textbooks at institution
• Reduce back and forth dialog with academics
• Reduce negotiation cycle time

16. How we might help?
• Seamless provisioning & student access
• Integrated into existing academic and library workflows
• seamless delivery and promotion to courses through reading list and VLE
• Detailed usage analytics to support
• academics in the teaching process
• acquisitions decision making

17. Identify modules

18. Initiate academic preferences selection

19. Academic preference selection

20. Discover and select alternatives

21. Review preferences

22. Review preferences

23. Select candidates

24. Select candidates

25. Negotiate candidate titles

26. Negotiate candidate titles

27. Provision titles

28. “Plymouth University is very pleased to work with Talis
in developing the Digital Content module with
additional functionality to help support efficient,
informed and user-focused workflows for core text
selection and acquisition”
– Jason Harper, Content Strategy Manager

29. Questions?

30. Video Delivery Partner