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.
The Courseware in Context Framework is getting a number of updates for 2018. The free suite of resources, originally launched in 2016 by the Online Learning Consortium and Tyton Partners (with contributions from SRI International), offers information and guidelines for selecting and implementing digital courseware products.
Nearly all of the courses for students earning an Associate of Arts degree in business will soon be covered by a free OpenStax textbook, thanks to a series of six new introductory business textbooks being produced by the Rice University-based publisher of open educational resources.
Kennesaw State University has seen a 48 percent reduction the D.F.W.I. (D, fail, withdraw, incomplete) rate in one of its core curriculum courses following a move to interactive courseware.
Wheaton College, a private liberal arts college in Massachusetts, is rolling out open education resources across the campus thanks to a partnership with learning platform panOpen.
Columbus State Community College created a multimedia e-book for English composition students that reduces textbook costs and reimagines the ways learners engage with course material.
Lumen Learning has created an online resource to help proponents of open educational resources make the case for O.E.R. use on campus.
Just months after Knewton launched Alta, its own line of higher education courseware with adaptive learning built in, the education technology company has closed a new round of financing that will enable it to scale its products. TriplePoint Capital led the funding, with $20 million, and Knewton's existing investors added an additional $5 million.
For the first time ever, 100,000 students have enrolled in Lumen Learning-supported courses in a single term. The threshold was crossed in June 2018, when a college success program offered at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana took the total count over the 100,000 mark.
Multiple signs indicate that the cost of textbooks is inching down. According to new data released by CampusBooks.com, the average price of a textbook dropped by $10 between January 2017 to January 2018. Simultaneously, the National Association of College Stores issued its latest results from a twice-annual survey of college students in the United States and Canada and found that course material spending had shrunk by 31 percent over the last decade.
JoVE, a publisher of video learning resources for STEM topics, has introduced a new set of biology courseware designed to completely replace the traditional textbook.