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The Newman Library has an office that obtains electronic rights to journal articles and even full books that professors assign in particular classes and put on reserve in the library. Once permissions are obtained, often for a fee, the library staff can scan the articles or acquire electronic versions of whole books and put them online, where only registered students and faculty can access them. This means that instead of one or two copies of a book or article that students scramble to get some time with, now everyone can access the material at the same time.
The digital format goes beyond the library as well. When Phyllis Zadra, assistant dean of the Zicklin School of Business, began reviewing the undergraduate business core curriculum courses Microeconomics and Macroeconomics in 1999, she was deeply concerned about the levels of student performance: 39 percent of all registered students received a grade of D, F, or W in the fall semester 1999. Three years later, during Fall 2002, that number dropped to 25 percent.
What was responsible for the dramatic improvement? A number of factors were involved: improved undergraduate admissions standards helped; the instructors agreed to adopt a standard text; precalculus was made a prerequisite; and, Zadra believes, multimedia materials boosted student performance.
The video streaming of lectures, which students can use to review class material and from which they can link to additional resources (discussed above), all began in the Department of Economics and Finance under Professor Jeffrey Weiss, who aimed at unifying the curriculum and raising student performance levels. But another important part of the multimedia mix has been the ancillary digital elements that came with the new texts.
"Back in December 2001, we had a show-and-tell, inviting five publishers to show their wares," Zadra says. "They all had tech stuff, which generally includes having the books online, study guides online, and online chapter quizzes that students could use to test themselves. After that, the faculty met, and it really got down to issues of technology. We weren't prepared to adopt a book that didn't have the technology and offer the training to use it."
The faculty chose to adopt Microeconomics, published by Addison-Wesley, for the Spring 2002 semester (the faculty has since adopted Principles of Microeconomics, by Southwestern). With the 14 percent improvement over the past three years in failure rates and in rates of students dropping from the courses, Zadra makes a very strong case for the commitment to technology.
Even before this, Baruch had already digitized its own textbook, bringing online in 2000 a text called The Student Guide to Great Works Courses, which provides undergraduates with a deeper perspective on, and ancillary readings for, the core curriculum humanities course Great Works of Literature.
The book was first published in 1991, and Great Works Coordinator Paula Berggren, who wrote much of the text, says that because print reproduction rights were so expensive important illustrative art for the book was slighted. Digital rights are easier to get, so the online text is a significant improvement.
"It was always my ambition to digitize the book," says Berggren. "It was my great good fortune that the people in the Newman Library were excited about working on this project."
Above: All of the 110 classrooms in the Vertical Campus have podium-
mounted computers with Internet connections and projection equipment.
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