Digital Course Materials
Here you'll find articles detailing new developments in the area of e-textbooks, open educational resources and other digital course materials, along with stories about institutions adopting them.
Knewton has updated its subscription options to allow students to access multiple courses. Priced at $79.99, the new Altapass gives students unlimited use of multiple Alta products across a single subject area for up to two years.
Learning materials publisher FlatWorld is now offering Flatworld Institutional, a textbook subscription service that allows universities and departments to tailor the textbook selection to students' specific needs.
The use of open educational resources could be at a turning point: It's beginning to shake off its fringe reputation and gain greater recognition among faculty and department heads. A recent Babson Survey Research Group study found "steady growth in awareness" among these individuals and predicted that adoption growth could accelerate.
A community college in New York City has introduced a criminal justice associate's degree that will use only open educational resources. The Borough of Manhattan Community College said the move is expected to save each student about $2,500 in textbook costs.
For the second year running, library collections in higher education now contain more digital items than physical. According to preliminary numbers issued by the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics, of the 2.5 billion items in colleges and universities in 2017, 59 percent were digital — books, databases, media and serials — and 41 percent were physical.
In our 2018 Teaching with Technology Survey, faculty members told us about their most-wanted hardware and software, feelings on tech's value for learning, technologies they're using in class and more.
A new open educational resources search tool has been directly integrated into Civitas Learning's academic planning platform, letting students know if O.E.R. materials are available as they build their course schedules.
A company that develops open courses has introduced two new initiatives intended to improve open educational resources. Lumen Learning has launched the "Learning Challenges Leaderboards," an analysis of outcomes covered by O.E.R. where students have the greatest difficulty, as well as RISE and Shine, a community effort to improve the O.E.R.
According to a recent survey, faculty members who choose course materials that cost less than $30 are 10 times more likely to get a positive rating from students than a negative rating. The survey was undertaken by textbook publisher FlatWorld.
Several of McGraw-Hill Education's digital course materials will now feature embedded audio- and video-capture capabilities from video platform GoReact.
