Electronic Textbooks
E-books are being widely adopted as alternatives to traditional textbooks. Here you'll find articles detailing new developments in the area of e-book and e-textbook technologies, along with stories about institutions adopting them.
Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College is working with three of the largest community college systems in the country to adopt the use of interactive open educational resources. The Consortium for Open Active Pathways, as it's called, will use technology to increase the availability of college-level educational materials, particularly in healthcare studies.
According to a recent survey, Amazon is the primary purchase channel for college students to buy their textbooks, beating out other websites as well as the brick-and-mortar college bookstore.
To help your students reduce the cost of their education, begin with open educational resources. Many of these textbooks won't cost them anything.
The concept of "open learning" encompasses far more than what's found in a textbook. These sources provide other kinds of resources that will boost your students' learning.
Cengage is adding a free Career Center for subscribers of Cengage Unlimited, the company's course materials subscription service.
Course materials provider FlatWorld is updating its homework platform with new capabilities. Included free with most of the company’s textbooks, FlatWorld Homework combines student assignments with instructor grading tools in a mobile-friendly interface.
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.
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.
