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.
Purdue University will be working with Chegg, a company that produces online homework help among other lines of business, to amplify its Online Writing Lab services.
"Virtual Field Trips," offers interactive experiences captured during actual expeditions with scientists doing current research. Some of the trips include adaptive feedback and adaptive pathways. The resources are already being used in high school and college classrooms to supplement lessons in biology, earth sciences, geology, anthropology and other studies.
Cengage is adding a free Career Center for subscribers of Cengage Unlimited, the company's course materials subscription service.
Google Arts & Culture, a Google project making high-resolution images of museum collections available to the public in an online repository, is now using 3D printing to bring historical artifacts and monuments to life for its Open Heritage Project.
The Khan Academy has launched a new series of videos focused on civics for students in K-12 and higher education — and anybody else interested in learning how government works in the United States.
Gale has updated its resources to be compliant with Learning Tools Interoperability 1.0 standards and Deep Linking from the IMS Global Learning Consortium. The move enables single sign-on and allows instructors to embed content from their library's Gale collections to into any learning management system that supports the standards, including Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, Schoology and more.
Binge-viewing could be coming to a library near you. RBmedia, which owns Recorded Books, has released an unlimited streaming video service for libraries, as well as a new version of its app to allow patrons to access multiple content services, including the streaming shows. RBdigital, the specialized streaming video service, will give library users the chance to view videos from RBmedia's licensed content in the same way they watch shows on Netflix. They'll be able to watch as many shows as they like in a seven-day period while the library pays for a single checkout.
What education technologies and trends will have the most impact in the coming year? We asked four higher ed IT leaders for their take.