Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google


Columbia College Uses Ed Map to Roll Fees, Book Costs into Tuition

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 05/22/18
male college student sitting on a bench holding textbooks

A Missouri college has signed with Ed Map to embed digital curriculum into its courses to make the expense invisible to students as part of a new tuition approach. Columbia College, a private nonprofit college in Columbia, announced the partnership for its adult education and online education divisions. All course materials will be part of the tuition students pay in those programs.

The "Truition" initiative (truth plus tuition), as the college has dubbed it, will roll out in the fall. The program promises students that they will never have "surprise expenses." Aside from tuition, there will be no fees or book costs. The school is using Ed Map's OPENVUE platform, which provides administrative resources to pull together multiple sources of curriculum, including open educational resources, and make them available through the learning management system.

The move appears to be intended to help the school compete on financial terms against larger, better known entities, including Penn State's World Campus, Arizona State University Online and Purdue University Global, among others. Currently, Columbia has a network of campuses around the country and serves 20,000 students in traditional and online courses.

The agreement with Ed Map will help students gain access to course materials beginning on their first day of class, said Piyusha Singh, vice president of online education and interim provost. "We knew our course materials strategy needed improvement," she noted, in a press release. "Students were either paying a high price at the college bookstore, turning elsewhere to the open market or choosing not to buy at all."

By bringing course materials automatically into the programs, "rather than having it be something our students needed to worry about," Singh added, the new approach will "help alleviate those concerns."

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • Digital Network of User Profiles and Data Connections

    Microsoft, RSA Make Identity Security Push in the Age of AI

    Two of the bigger authentication announcements to come out of the recent RSA Conference both point in the same direction: Organizations need a more flexible, unified approach to identity security, especially as AI agents start acting alongside human workers.

  • AI logo near computer equipment

    White House Releases National Policy Framework for AI

    The White House has released a four-page AI policy framework aimed at setting a national approach to AI, with priorities including child safety, intellectual property protections, truth and accuracy guardrails, and worker training for an AI-driven economy.

  • Profile silhouette of a person thoughtfully touching their chin, overlaid with transparent data visualizations and digital interface elements suggesting artificial intelligence and analytics.

    The Institutional Knowledge Shift Is Reshaping Higher Ed IT

    Higher education IT leaders are navigating a quiet but consequential transition: Experienced team members are retiring or leaving for private-sector roles, and the teams replacing them are smaller, newer, and often stretched thin. The result is a structural shift in how technology decisions are made, executed, and sustained.

  • Abstract digital data stream with binary code and colorful light trails

    Microsoft Releases Open Source AI Safety Tools for Agent Development

    Microsoft released RAMPART and Clarity as open-source projects intended to help developers test AI agents earlier in the software lifecycle and turn red-team findings into repeatable engineering checks.