As you may have read about in either my post back in December or our recent press release with Pearson, VitalSource continues its commitment to improving and simplifying access to course materials. We’re happy to report back some numbers based on recent industry leading improvements in removing courseware access codes and simplifying faculty and student access to course materials.

We piloted our new integrations this fall with a handful of schools, hundreds of course sections, and thousands of students with resounding success. The pilots were conducted as part of the institutions’ Inclusive Access programs, which provides students with day-one access to all their digital course materials at one affordable price.

The two main goals of this pilot were to simplify the student experience and reduce overhead for administration. We found that removing access codes is one part of the equation, and offering the eTextbook bundled with the courseware product has made a significant difference for the publisher, institution, and student! We were also able to remove four to six weeks of integration work between the LMS administrators and courseware providers.

With these integrations, students and faculty can spend more time doing what they should be doing, learning and teaching. This simple SSO integration has removed the need for faculty to provide basic support to students, and student confusion around obtaining their courseware.

One of the metrics we track closely for Inclusive Access is the opt-out rate for each course and title, as it provides a measure of student satisfaction with the program. Courseware access code delivery typically receives a 5% opt-out rate per course across the industry. The average opt-out rate for our combined Pearson courseware pilots was an incredibly low 1.2%! One resounding success was at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where there were 208 enrollments and not one opt out.

We are excited about how this program has worked so far and we look forward to hearing more success stories for the spring semester!