IT education 'could be supplemented by e-books'

17:27 11th November 2008

E-books could prove to be an important tool for those taking IT courses, one expert has suggested.

Andy Black, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency's manager for technical research management, claimed that e-books can offer a number of benefits for people seeking to improve their education when used alongside traditional learning tools such as textbooks.

"E-books have great potential to allow learners to access large texts in a relatively lightweight form," he remarked, adding that they are "especially useful for specialist texts" because it is easy to bookmark sections that can be used at a later date.

The medium has already been championed by the City Academy, Hackney, which is scheduled to open in September 2009.

That learning facility plans to make e-books available for mobile phones, so that pupils can avoid having to take home whole textbooks to do their homework and instead can simply download the relevant pages.

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