The VitalSource Resource

Across the nation, a growing number of colleges and universities are looking for innovative solutions that can help lower costs and raise student achievement.

One of the many challenges in higher education is the cost of course materials and textbooks. Print textbook costs have risen 82 percent over the last decade – that’s more than three times the rate of inflation. These high costs have led a growing number of students to delay or avoid purchasing required course materials, even though they know their grades will suffer as a result.

Ever since ‘learning gain’ became one of the major criteria included in the teaching excellence framework (TEF), the question of how students learn and how we can measure universities’ support in their learning journey has become more prominent. To gain more insight into this, VitalSource organised a roundtable discussion with senior figures in higher education, in partnership with Times Higher Education (THE), to discuss how they are approaching this key measure of achievement.

Recently, VitalSource retired our venerable, 18-year-old proprietary ebook format, known as Dash, DashML or VitalSource XML. As part of Dash’s retirement ceremony, we transitioned students using Dash books to EPUB versions, seamlessly maintaining all of their licenses, bookmarks, notes and highlights to make sure the big change, years in the making, was painless.

Engineering work on Dash began all the way back in 1997 with the (then quite risky!) decision to go with the new XML format for our product, rather than the “industry standard” at the time, SGML. Creating the format was what lead us to develop the flexible VitalBook format (for which we received a patent in the United States, Australia, Canada, The Peoples Republic of China, The European Union, Hong Kong, and India) in 2004. Dash survived for years – through the launch of our early apps VitalViewer and vitalsource KEY, and of course it was the first format built into our popular Bookshelf textbook apps still available today.

Helping publishers and educators create great content is an important part of our mission at VitalSource. Working toward this goal, we continually invest in VitalSource Content Studio, our easy-to-use authoring tool for making interactive, accessible, and responsive learning content.

To this end, we made tremendous strides in 2017! We’ve spent the past year listening to feedback and making the improvements you asked for, and we’re committed to making VitalSource Content Studio the very best tool for creating engaging learning content for your students.

How many internal meetings have left your team saying, “if only we had a platform for those customers, we’d grow sales” or “If only we had a way to easily sell collections, we could enter that market” or, even “If only we had a way to easily sample to that group, we’d increase awareness of our great content”?

We have good news: with VitalSource Bridge, selling or sampling a selection of titles to a distinct group of users has never been easier.