Indiana University’s Brad Wheeler explains how his institution is ditching the college textbook and replacing it with digital alternatives that are accessible to students from day one.
it’s taken a long time for textbook publishers to own up to the “fundamental flaw” of their industry: “They are obsessed with counting their gross margins on the things they actually do sell.” And, he added, they ignore the enormous amounts they lose through the other 75 percent of the market made up of used and rented books and other kinds of substitutes. Because of those blinders, the publishers have “long pursued a model that has been failing, year over year.”
Starting in the mid-1990s, the price of educational books rose faster than just about any other measure, including healthcare. Something had to give. Wheeler has seen a “constellation of things” forming to bring about change. First, the e-reader software has matured, he said. “It works on your phone, your tablet, your laptop.”
Second, students are “increasingly digital.” They’re “comfortable with interacting with digital information [and] electronically marking it up.” After all, he noted, “some of them went through high school with digital books and materials.”
Third, familiarity is growing among faculty too. “They see e-texts not just as a substitute for paper, but as a teaching and pedagogical tool. They can go in and annotate that paragraph in the textbook and point to classroom materials or go online and correct something,
Fourth, the printed textbook-first philosophy has stopped paying off for publishers.
The three biggies — Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Cengage — weren’t first in line to sign on, even as additional universities piled onto Indiana U’s project. As a result, their reticence to promote textbook alternatives hit their bottom lines. Eventually, Pearson’s shares took a hit, hovering currently around $8; McGraw-Hill’s education division was peeled off and sold to Apollo Global Management in 2013; and just months later Cengage filed for bankruptcy, emerging a year later with $4 billion less debt.
Unizin. This is the organization created by Indiana U and other large institutional partners to develop services that could replace major paid third-party applications, such as learning management, digital textbook and data warehouse platforms. The goal: to enable higher ed to own its data.
ELI Online Event | July 12, 2017 | Noon–4:00 p.m. (ET)
One in five colleges have issued digital badges, according to a recent survey.* Today, all kinds of organizations, from higher education institutions to professional associations to employers, are issuing digital microcredentials. Are you?
Join us for an introductory webinar, “Alternative Credentialing in Higher Education,” on July 10. Both events are free and open to all EDUCAUSE members (available to purchase for nonmembers).
over the last four years, 49 states and the District of Columbia have introduced 410 bills related to student data privacy, and 36 states have passed 85 new education data privacy laws. Also, since 2014, 19 states have passed laws that in some way address the work done by researchers.
researchers need to get better at communicating about their projects, especially with non-researchers.
One approach to follow in gaining trust “from parents, advocates and teachers” uses the acronym CUPS:
Collection: What data is collected by whom and from whom;
Use: How the data will be used and what the purpose of the research is;
Protection: What forms of data security protection are in place and how access will be limited; and
Sharing: How and with whom the results of the data work will be shared.
Second, researchers must pin down how to share data without making it vulnerable to theft.
Third, researchers should build partnerships of trust and “mutual interest” pertaining to their work with data. Those alliances may involve education technology developers, education agencies both local and state, and data privacy stakeholders.
Wang, Q., Quek, C., & Hu, H. (2017). Designing and Improving a Blended Synchronous Learning Environment : An Educational Design Research. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(3), 99-118
Definition: blended synchronous learning has attracted much attention and it is often labelled with synchronous hybrid learning (Cain & Henriksen 2013); synchronous blended learning (Okita, 201 3 ); multi – access learning (Irvine, Code, & Richards, 2013); or simultaneous delivery of course s to on – campus and off – campus students (White et al ., 2010). Adapted from the definition given by Bower , Dalgarno, Kennedy, Lee, and Kenney (2015), blended synchronous learning in this paper is defined as a learning method that enables online students to participate in classroom learning activities simultaneously via comput er – mediated communication technologies such as video conferencing . By following this approach , on – campus students attend F2F le ssons in the physical classroom. M eanwhile, online students who are situated at multiple sites participate in the identical class room learning activities via two – way video conferencing in real time .
With regard to educational benefits , blended synchronous learning can help to establish rich teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence ( Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 200 0 ; Szeto, 2015 ). A BSLE provides a mimic classroom environment (White et al. , 2010) , where teachers ’ direct instruction and facilitation can be easily carried out a nd the teaching presence is hence naturally established.
Whether you’re flipping your courses, creating videos to help your students understand specific concepts or recording lectures for exam review, these tips can help you optimize your production setup on a tight budget.
1) Speak Into the Microphone
2) Reconsider Whether You Want to be a Talking Head
Record your video and upload it to YouTube. YouTube will apply its machine transcription to the audio as a starting point. Then you can download the captions into your caption editor and improve on the captions from there. Afterward, you can delete the video from YouTube and add it to your institution’s platform.
+++++++++++++++++++++ Defining my interests. Narrowing a topic. How do I collect information? How do I search for information?
How do we search for “serious” information?
Google and Google Scholar
Microsoft Semantic Scholar (Semantic Scholar); Microsoft Academic Search; Academicindex.net; Proquest Dialog; Quetzal; arXiv;
basic electronic (library) search information and strategies. Library research services (5 min)
using the library database, do a search on a topic of your interest.
compare the returns on your search. make an attempt to refine the search.
retrieve the following information about the book of interest: is it relevant to your topic (check the subjects); is it timely (check the published date); is it available
Strategies for conducting advanced searches (setting up filters and search criteria)
Following are the SCSU library locations:
USA – To kill a mockingbird – PS3562.E353 T6x
Russia – War and Peace – AC1 .G72 v.51
Canada – Anne of Green Gables – PR6025.O45 A5 1994x
United Kingdom – Pride and Prejudice – PR4034 .P7 1991b online at http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/pridprej.html
Spain – Shadow in the Wind – PQ6668.U49 S6613 2004
Iran – Persepolis – PN6747.S245 P4713
Ireland – Ulysses – PR6019.O9 U4 1998 Bulgaria – Under the Yoke – PG1037.V3 U5x China – Dream of the Red Chamber – PL2998.T745 D7 1958cx Congo – The antipeople – PQ3989.2.S64 A813 1988
What do you think should be your country’s favorite book?
Monday 24 April 2017 19.01 EDT Alex Hern Technology reporter
Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is launching a new online publication which will aim to fight fake news by pairing professional journalists with an army of volunteer community contributors.
Wikitribune plans to pay for the reporters by raising money from a crowdfunding campaign.
The ideas behind Wikitribune are similar to other experiments with sustainable community journalism.
Dutch news website De Correspondent, for instance, was launched in 2013 after a €1m (£850,000) crowdfunding campaign, with a goal of focusing on reporter-led in-depth coverage of a select few topics backed up by strong involvement from a community of financial backers.
After participating in this course, you will be able to:
incorporate ever-evolving definitions of digital literacy into learning opportunities
draw upon a variety of digital resources to create digital-learning opportunities
seek additional resources that you can use in your continuing efforts to keep up with new developments in digital literacy in libraries and other learning organizations
What is digital literacy? Do you know how you can foster digital literacy through formal and informal learning opportunities for your library staff and users?
Supporting digital literacy still remains an important part of library staff members’ work, but sometimes we struggle to agree on a simple, meaningful definition of the term. In this four-week eCourse, training/learning specialist Paul Signorelli will begin by exploring a variety of definitions, focusing on work by a few leading proponents of the need to foster digital literacy among people of all ages and backgrounds. He will explore a variety of digital-literacy resources – including case studies of how we creatively approach digital-literacy learning opportunities for library staff and users, and will explore a variety of digital tools that will help to encourage further understanding of this topic.
Now, who is ready to build their digital-literacy skills and help their users become digitally literate as well?
eCourse Outline
Part 1: Digital Literacy: Initial Definitions and Explorations
An overview of various definitions of digital literacy
