Remember the good old days, when you’d go to your lectures with nothing more than a pad and a pen? Well, those days may be coming to a close now that the University of Notre Dame has launched the first paperless class taught using Apple’s iPad instead of traditional textbooks.
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“This has become known as the iPad class,” Corey Angst, assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame (and a member of Notre Dame’s ePublishing Working Group) said. However there is a reason that students are using the tablets — and it’s not necessarily to cut down on paper usage. The course revolves around a unique, year-long Notre Dame study of eReaders, and Angst is conducting the first phase using iPads, which were released earlier this year with impressive sales figures.
On the university’s website, Angst wrote, “One unique thing we are doing is conducting research on the iPad.” “We want to know whether students feel the iPads are useful and how they plan to use them. I want them to tell me, ‘I found this great app that does such and such. I want this to be organic…We have an online Wiki discussion group where students can share their ideas.”
