BibliU: Enabling equitable access to textbooks
By its own assertion, BibliU has an ‘audacious vision for learning’. Founded in 2013 through OUI’s startup incubator, BibliU set out to ensure all university and college students had affordable access to their class content, helping tackle issues around social mobility in higher education. To achieve this, the team built partnerships with thousands of publishers and created a platform dedicated to making learning more equitable, effective and efficient.
BibliU’s technology and platform has three main offerings:
- Students benefit from software that gives them access to textbooks and other course materials - essentially an unlimited ebook streaming service available from day one and included in their tuition fee
- Using BibliU’s tools, universities can automate workflows around course material selection, pricing and deployment
- Teaching staff can access software helping them better understand how their students are performing over time
To see how BibliU is driving change, take the example of Jackson College - a public college in Michigan, USA. An impact report carried out on behalf of BibliU found that usage of its platform correlated with better grades at Jackson. In fact, the more times Jackson students used BibliU, the better their grades: the average grade point average (GPA) of heavy users was one point higher than light users and higher than the college average.
Retention rates also increased steadily as students used BibliU more frequently. 94% of heavy BibliU users were still enrolled from autumn 2021 to spring 2022. Meanwhile, only 47% of non or light BibliU users were still enrolled from autumn 2021 to spring 2022.
The so-called ‘BibliU cohort’ - students who used BibliU and were first-time enrollees - had the highest retention rate at Jackson since autumn 2018.
Impact
- More than 1.2 million users since January 2016
- 221 publishers
- More than 1.4 million learning assets
- Around 680,000 monthly study hours on average
The more times Jackson students used BibliU, the better their grades: the average grade point average (GPA) of heavy users was one whole point higher than light users and higher than the college average.
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