Macmillan Learning Intros Curated OER Course Materials
Macmillan Learning is launching a new course materials product that brings together open educational resources, instructor supplements and on-demand support. Dubbed Intellus Open Courses, the materials are curated by the company's subject-matter experts and editorial team.
"Each Intellus Open Course contains content from open e-books, under CC-BY licenses, and instructor resources like PowerPoint slides and test bank questions, as well as other open assets including YouTube videos, optional institutional library content, primary source documents, and more. Our subject-matter experts use the power of the Intellus Learning platform to locate the best open content available from the leading OER content providers and package them into a turnkey courses for use by instructors," explained Renee Altier, vice president of institutional strategy for Macmillan Learning, in a statement.
The Intellus Open Courses will debut this spring in 16 general-education subjects, including American government, sociology, economics, pre-algebra, psychology and chemistry. The materials are priced at $14.99 per student per course; students will be able to access and retain all the OER materials for each course.
Bundled support services for the courses include learning management system integration, on-demand training and implementation support, instructor supplements and customization tools. Instructors can add new content, remix or modify content to suit their needs; licensing data is available so that instructors can follow the usage requirements for each content item. In addition, the platform provides analytics to gauge student engagement with the materials.
"I adopted the Intellus Open Course for my American Government course because I was impressed with the additional assets and capabilities they've built, which make it more than simply an open textbook. With the added features and analytics that the Intellus platform provides, we will not only decrease the cost of course resources for our students, but also positively impact learning without starting completely from scratch," commented Jessica Scarffe, associate professor at Allan Hancock College.
For more information, visit the Intellus Open Courses site.
About the Author
Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].