Five University of Wisconsin classes have gone digital, and are joining forces with other large universities around the country in an eText pilot program this semester.

According to the UW website, the eText pilot is an attempt to influence the use of electronic textbooks on campus.

The trial period to use eTexts involves five classes, six faculty and roughly 600 students and will be conducted only for this semester, UW spokesperson Brian Rust said in an email to The Badger Herald. UW is one of five universities participating in the eText pilot, including Cornell, University of California-Berkeley, University of Minnesota and University of Virginia.

There are several eTexts for each class, Rust said. Courseload, the vendor service that is contracted to deliver the electronic text content on behalf of publisher, enables access to the texts by any device that runs HTML5.

“The five campuses involved agreed that we wanted to work together to get experiences from students and faculty as a way of evaluating eTextbooks,” Bruce Maas, vice provost for Information Technology, said. “It’s sort of a lower-risk way of gaining some experience and gathering feedback before we decide how we want to proceed in the future.”

Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning Aaron Brower said the future of textbooks is online, both for cost reasons and the flexibility that the Internet offers students and professors.

Brower also said the eTexts could offer as much as a 30 percent decrease in costs for students.

“For these specific pilot classes, there was no fee for the students,” Maas said. “If we move forward in the future with eTextbooks, we would expect to negotiate a tract of prices that would benefit students.”

Suzannah Sandrik, UW engineering professor, teaches one of the five classes participating in the eText pilot. She expressed excitement for the program and said it makes a world of difference for student budgets.

“The neat thing is this semester, there are 100 of my students who get free textbooks,” Sandrick said. “One of the things I appreciate about the university is their championing to keep costs down and providing options for financial savings.”

Assistant professor of sociology Felix Elwert also teaches one of the five classes participating in the eText pilot. He said the program is not only about saving money, but also exploring ways of using technology to benefit students and learning.

“Once we move something online, we can add functionalities to facilitate learning such as taking notes and sharing them with students and faculty online,” Elwert said.

Brower said the eText pilot exists to further investigate whether eText will have a positive effect on UW. Evaluations to test the effectiveness of the program will take place before the university makes a decision on whether to continue it.

Rust said academic technology staff will work closely with UW faculty to evaluate facets of the program, ranging from cost-effectiveness to changes in learning and teaching.

“As of right now, it’s too hard to tell how this will play out,” Brower said. “Going from five classes to 3,200 classes to implement eText is not simple, but I think if it’s cheaper for students, if material is better, and if everyone likes it, there is no reason not to go forward in this direction.”