The University of Bath prides itself on operating one of the UK’s leading business schools, featuring in the global top 10 of the Corporate Knights Better World MBA rankings.

The School of Management offers two MBA programmes to serve its UK and international students, keeping cohorts small to offer a more intimate learning experience.

The full-time MBA is delivered on campus in one year, whilst the Executive part-time MBA offers senior executives a flexible study experience.

In 2020, the school chose Kortext as their eTextbook partner to support their digital transformation.

Supporting sustainability and access with eTextbooks

Whilst propelled by the Covid-19 pandemic into embracing digitally-enhanced learning, as many universities were, the School had several motivations to support their decision to go digital with course content:

• Sustainability – eTextbook provision that reduces the need for print and delivery, aligning with the university’s sustainability strategy
• Ease and equity of access – course content that can be accessed equally, anytime, anywhere and on any device, and that’s literally a weight off students’ shoulders
• Engagement features – enabling students to interact more deeply with their course content
• eBooks in Perpetuity – a promise that students can keep their eTextbooks (and notes!) to reference after they’ve graduated
• Administrative benefits – saving time by reducing the need for staff to order and post textbooks out to students worldwide.

The university’s partnership with Kortext has delivered this and more. Kortext now supplies the School of Management with digital copies of all the books their students need to succeed in their MBA, accessible through our smart study platform.

Alicia John, current MBA student at the University of Bath, said:

It makes all the difference not having to lug heavy books around. And with Kortext you can easily steal moments during the day to study – like when you’re on the train or bus – even if it’s just catching up on something on your phone.

 

It’s so critical to be able to keep our eTextbooks when we graduate. As business and management students, we need to be able to reference back to our reading – it’s one of the first things I checked as I prepared for the first module.

A supportive eTextbook partnership

When it comes to the level of support provided throughout the partnership, David Todd, Head of MBA Programmes at the university, commented:

“Kortext has always provided great support. We’ve seen very few issues with book availability, but any books not available in the Kortext inventory were quickly sourced and made available by the team – so they’ve always found a solution for us.

“It’s been a very successful partnership so far. Both parties have worked well together and we see Kortext having even greater value in the future as we begin using their analytics data more fully to understand if and how the content we provide is being optimised by students.”

If there’s no one accessing the book, there’s no point having it. We are likely to see continuing budgetary pressures this year, so this data is very powerful in helping us optimise our expenditure.

In the academic year 2021/22 alone, the University of Bath’s MBA students have shown deep engagement with their course content on the Kortext Arcturus platform, recording:

• 110,934 pages read by students
• 4,888 in-book annotations
• 14% increase in pages read per active user year on year

Looking to the future

As Kortext continues its support of the University of Bath’s MBA programmes, we asked Donald Lancaster, Senior Lecturer and Director of Teaching for MBAs, what he thinks the future holds for digitally enhanced learning:

There is no question that the world is moving towards more digitised textbooks, but there are serious structural and economic issues that need sorting with many of the current publishers’ models. This is why the Kortext aggregation model delivering all the textbooks we need across multiple publishers on one platform is so powerful.

 

Ultimately, more digital books means more learning and engagement opportunities for our students through supplementary videos, tests within books etc. which can only be a good thing.

Want to know how we help universities and business schools around the globe to provide fair and easy access to eTextbooks and study materials for their students? Read more of our case studies or be sure to get in touch.