Nursing School to Begin Implementing eBooks This Fall

Freshmen, sophomores and second-degree nursing students will be carrying a lighter load this fall—literally. The School of Nursing will begin the transition to eBooks to be utilized in both the classroom and clinical learning settings.

Dr. Mary Ellen Glasgow

The decision to implement the use of eBooks, according to Nursing Dean Dr. Mary Ellen Glasgow, was made for various reasons, including convenience, cost-effectiveness and patient safety.

“Nursing books can be very bulky and heavy, so oftentimes students don’t carry them when they’re on campus or at a clinical site,” explained Glasgow. “With the eBooks, they will have their ‘books’ with them on their iPads or mini-iPads wherever they go. Being able to access them any time will be a really good thing.”

The School of Nursing is the only one of its kind in Pittsburgh implementing eBooks, according to Glasgow, who utilized eBooks when she taught at Drexel University.

The nursing school is providing a cost savings of 40 percent to students for the purchasing price of the eBooks. Students will be introduced to Pageburst eBooks from Elsevier, which is the world’s leading publisher in health science. Duquesne’s Barnes & Noble Bookstore partnered with Elsevier to offer students an exclusive comprehensive bundle of nursing texts utilized by the school’s program.

In addition to iPads and mini-iPads, the eBooks can be downloaded onto laptop or desktop computers as well as iPhones, Androids and Kindle Fires. The eBooks are accessed utilizing a free app available from Apple’s iTunes Store.

“The eBooks are integrated, so students will be able to link from one book to another,” said Glasgow. “It also provides videos, so if a student is at their clinical site and needs to put in an I.V. or change a dressing—whatever the skill—they can watch a video from their eBook to review how to do it before having to do it on the patient.”

From a patient-safety perspective, Glasgow said that students will be able to quickly look up accurate, up-to-date clinical information. “That’s critical,” she said, referring to it as point-of-care technology. “If a patient has a question or a student wants to more information on a drug, they can quickly look it up on the iPad right there. If the books are that accessible, the student will be more likely to do so if the eBook is ‘with them’ at all times.”

Nursing faculty will each receive an iPad and have already begun to take classes on how to utilize the eBooks. “If you’re going to be a relevant educator in the 21st century, you have to embrace technology and be as technologically savvy as your students, and that’s what we’re doing,” said Glasgow.

The eBooks will be implemented in the fall of 2014 to include juniors, with all students utilizing eBooks by the fall of 2015.