Students at UVA’s Darden School of Business find the Kindle DX electronic reading device too rigid for use in fast-paced business school classrooms, according to a recent article on the school’s news site. Darden is one of seven universities – and the only business school – to participate in a pilot project with Amazon over the past year to test the Kindle’s use in the classroom.
After almost a year of using Kindles as part of the pilot, most participating Darden students prefer the old-fashioned paper alternatives of textbooks, cases and articles – at least when it comes to their business school classes, the school reports.
“You must be highly engaged in the classroom every day,’’ said Michael Koenig, Darden’s director of MBA operations. The Kindle is “not flexible enough. … It could be clunky,” he continued. “You can’t move between pages, documents, charts and graphs simply or easily enough compared to the paper alternatives.’’
Koenig conducted a mid-term survey that uncovered the students’ dissatisfaction. When asked if they would recommend the Kindle DX to an incoming Darden MBA student, 75 to 80 percent of those participating in the pilot said no, according to Koenig. But when asked if they would recommend the Kindle DX as a personal reading device, 90 to 95 percent said yes.
“What that says to me is that Amazon created a very well-designed consumer device for purchasing and reading digital books, magazines and newspapers,’’ Koenig said. “It’s not yet ready for prime time in the highly engaged Darden business school classroom.’’
Koenig, who approached Amazon to take part in the pilot, is nonetheless quite pleased to have participated. “We learned a lot and are much more prepared as a top-tier business school to face the complex challenges of digital content distribution for all future Darden students,” he said.
Darden gave the Kindle to a randomly selected but representative group of 62 first-year students to use as an alternative to traditional paper business cases, articles and textbooks (though they still had access to paper materials to ensure fairness). Participation in Amazon’s pilot program supported the school’s aggressive sustainability goals. Darden aims to be a zero waste, zero carbon enterprise by 2020 and a top 10 school for teaching and research on sustainability by 2013.
“We’re constantly piloting and assessing initiatives which provide our students the opportunity to go paperless,” Koenig said. He hopes Darden’s survey results will have helped Amazon identify those few hardware and software upgrades necessary to begin competing against the traditional paper options available in the business school marketplace.
“eBook readers like the Kindle DX already represent an early stage disruptive technology in the higher education course materials acquisition and distribution arena,” he said. “Through this pilot, Darden’s strategy to address these impending changes to this marketplace and its impact on our students is well ahead of our peers.”
Read the full article: Kindle Experiment Flops at UVA’s Darden School of Business
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