When college students are stumped on their classwork, where do they turn? Most of the time, not to their textbooks, according to a survey performed at the behest of Nature Publishing Group. According to Vikram Savkar, who heads the group's Nature Education effort, 80 percent of the time, the students do what the rest of us do: look to Google, and often on from there to Wikipedia. Nature Education is an effort to change that and, in the process, provide a better science education experience.

Since January, Nature Education's first product, Scitable, has been available to the public. The goal, according to Savkar, is to provide the sort of dynamic social content that college students now expect—as he noted, biology study groups had already formed spontaneously on Facebook. "The old content models are out of date," he said, "we all know that textbooks aren't what students find interesting."

Content on Scitable

What textbooks provide, however, is a degree of credibility that most of the online world can't match. Wikipedia may bail a student out, but teaching faculty aren't necessarily likely to count on it as course material. That's where Savkar thinks that the backing of Nature comes in; it's got over a century of credibility with the scientific community. But credibility would only get Scitable so far, so it's taken the approach that a standard publisher would, arranging for a combination of science writers, teaching faculty, and researchers to provide content for the site. Where relevant, the content links back to a full version the original paper, provided it was published by one of the Nature journals.

So, for example, in the article on the genetic code contains a detailed description of the experimental approach that led to our understanding of how DNA encodes proteins. But it also contains a bibliography that includes links to the original papers, which are available to anyone who's set up an account on the service—Savkar said that the instructional material is meant to serve as a bridge to the actual research. There's also an extensive list of other material on related topics that is available at Scitable.

All of that material has been reviewed by the editors at the site. There's also an "Ask an Expert" box that appears on the topic pages, which allows registered users to get feedback and clarification from the editorial staff or content contributors.

These pages are also set up in what are termed "study paths," sets of linked topic pages that are roughly analogous to chapters in a textbook. Because of the nonlinear nature of the Web, Scitable has the advantage of being able to reuse a single topic page wherever it's appropriate. Faculty who are interested in using Scitable for their classrooms can form a group on the site and assign different study paths and individual topic pages to their students. These groups can be kept private (the vast majority are), and allow the faculty member to post messages and additional class material; in essence, they act as a combination of syllabus and online discussion board for the class, and link directly to the course material.

But groups aren't limited to faculty—anyone can start one, which is where the social aspects of the service come in. So far, most of the discussion groups appear to be focused on individual courses, but there are a number of exceptions, like an international student's group. Any content uploaded to these public groups is vetted by Scitable's experts before being made available, ensuring the quality of the material on the site.

A flexible textbook

We also spoke with Clare O'Connor, who has both written content for Scitable and used it in a class she teaches at Boston College, which is designed for non-majors. "That's a lot more of a challenge for an instructor than a traditional genetics class," O'Connor said. "You want them to understand that genetics is important to their life, and there are few texts available that do that. I was going to use a Wiki, as I've used them before in my class, when I heard about Scitable from a colleague."

In addition to writing some of her own material for the class, O'Connor has used a number of the items written by other authors, primarily from the "Genetics and Society" section. The modular nature of the material was really helpful to her, as she could avoid the material that was too sophisticated for her students. The flexibility of the system was important to her, as was the fact that Nature stands behind it—"it's information I feel I can trust, as opposed to other sites out there on the Web," O'Connor said.

Because of the fact that her students were non-majors, she didn't recommend that they follow up by reading the original papers that her material referred to, and she isn't aware of any of them doing so. Still, she found the access to past Nature publications useful, because she hadn't read a number of the classic papers herself. O'Connor said, however, that Scitable isn't a full replacement for textbooks for more advanced students, since it lacks the sorts of problem sets that many rely on for understanding the material.

A different science education

Right now, Scitable only does genetics, since it was decided that Nature had the biggest back catalog of work in that field, but other subjects are on the way. Savkar says that the plan is to expand rapidly into new subject areas over the next two years or so. So, it's a bit difficult to evaluate the service, both because it's easier to find what you're looking for within limited content, and because it will necessarily have a limited user community. Even with that limited crowd, however, finding groups and people wasn't a simple experience (for example, there didn't appear to be any way to eliminate any private groups from a search), although the science content itself was well laid out.

Practicalities aside, Savkar made it very clear that Nature had big goals for Scitable's place in science education. Both the modular nature of the material and the direct tie-ins to the historic literature are intended to help present science as a logical process, rather than something that needs to be memorized. "Students don't want to think about science as a collection of facts, they think of it as a discovery process," as Savkar put it. Scitable isn't the only group thinking along these lines—it was clearly the motivation of the group that produced the Understanding Science website. It's difficult not to hope that the focus on experimental logic will work, given that it motivates a lot of the science coverage at Ars.

There are a couple of related goals where progress is a bit easier to track. For example, Savkar is hoping that the site will place the developing world on equal footing when it comes to getting up-to-date instructional material, and Savkar says there are some signs of that happening. He also mentioned that they're starting to see traffic from adults that are not in enrolled in classes, as well as a few advanced high school classes. Finally, some of the pages are starting to place well in searches, which may mean that the goal of providing a credible source of general science information is achievable.

All of these are positive signs that Scitable may ultimately have a chance to achieve two of the goals that Savkar has set for it: keep the public engaged in science, and keep the pipeline of students interested in a science career from leaking too badly. But the site will eventually have to turn a profit; there are a number of ways that Nature hopes to achieve that, but there's no way to know how long the company will be willing to wait for them to pan out.

In the meantime, the Scitable content is free and, being online, it does much better than textbooks when it comes to connecting the topics with both historic and ongoing research efforts. I'm looking forward to seeing how it handles topics that I'm less familiar with.