But more technology doesn’t always mean better results. Within K-12 learning environments, the digital divide means that students in low-income and rural households have less access to reliable internet and fewer connected deviceson which to complete the online portions of their homework. And while Pearson’s initiative applies only to textbooks in higher ed, the shift to digital has implications at the collegiate level as well.
Just as traditional software has a thriving open source community, textbooks have Open Educational Resources, complete textbooks that typically come free of charge digitally, or for a small fee—enough to cover the printing—in hard copy. And while it’s not an entirely new concept, OER has gained momentum in recent years, particularly as support has picked up at an institutional level, rather than on a course by course basis. According to a 2018 Babson College survey, faculty awareness of OER jumped from 34 percent to 46 percent since 2015.
One of OER’s leading proponents is OpenStax, a nonprofit based out of Rice University that offers a few dozen free textbooks, covering everything from AP Biology to Principles of Accounting. In the 2019–2020 academic year, 2.7 million students across 6,600 institutions used an OpenStax product instead of a for-profit equivalent.
The knock against OER is that, well, you get what you pay for. “One faculty member told me only half-jokingly, that OER is like a puppy that’s free. You get the free puppy, but then you have to do all the work,” says Cengage’s Hansen, who argues that traditional publishers provide critical supporting materials, like assessment questions, that OER often lacks, and can push more regular updates.
By virtue of being free, OER materials also heavily skew toward digital, with hardcover as a secondary option. (Or you can download the PDF and print it out yourself.) The same caveats about efficacy apply. But at least OER doesn’t lock you into one digital platform, the way the major publishers do. OpenStax alone counts around 50 ecosystem partners to provide homework and testing support.
Like and Subscribe
Or you could always split the difference.
That’s the territory Cengage wants to stake out. Late last summer, the educational publishing behemoth—it announced a planned merger with McGraw Hill in May; the combined company would surpass all but Pearson in market capitalization—rolled out Cengage Unlimited, a “Netflix for Textbooks” model that rolls all textbook rentals and digital platform access into a single rate: $120 for a semester, $180 for a full year, or $240 for two years. Almost a year in, the US-only program has a million subscribers.
Once students register with iFlipd, they can rent digital textbooks for as little as a week. Once they finish using a book, they can move it back into the digital catalogue, making it available to other students. There is a loyalty program that gives points toward free rentals.
iFlipd is also integrated with Datalogics and its interactive Active Textbook e-book system so that students have sharing capabilities. They can share notes on the texts through the platform and access notes made by previous users of the same textbooks. The note-sharing platform allows for highlighting, annotations, audio, video and search.
About 80% of the revenue still comes from renting textbooks, which might seem a bit outdated with everyone talking about tablet deployments and digital textbooks.
Though heavily funded and with more than 225,000 digital textbooks in its library, the startup was sold for pennies on a dollar to Intel Education last week.
With the Internet and tablet devices, publishers themselves can now go directly for the students through digital products. There is no need for physical bookstores or other middlemen to distribute the textbooks. Also professors are now able to sell their own textbooks directly to students.
This IPO is not so much about the current business of renting physical textbooks but about the time after paper-based textbooks. Chegg apparently does not see a future with publishers or professors by their side, and they will probably choose more direct sales channels in order to balance out sinking margins.
Connexions: A place for teachers, students, and professionals to search and contribute scholarly content, organized into “modules” or topic areas instead of entire textbooks.
CK12 FlexBooks: A nonprofit that aims to reduce the cost of textbook materials by encouraging the development of what they call the “FlexBook.” Anyone can view or help create these standards-based, customizable, collaborative texts.
Shmoop: An up-and-coming collection of freely shared, expert-written content (most Shmoop authors are Ph.D.s and high school or college-level educators) with the goal of inspiring students and providing tons of free resources to teachers that include writing guides, analyses, and discussions.
MIT Open CourseWare: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology publishes nearly all of its course content on this site, from videos to lecture notes to exams, all free of charge and open to the public. Many other universities are doing the same, often using the content management system EduCommons.
Milliman also plans to create a U Arizona course tailored to individuals who might come to the university via the Age of Empires IV experience. “It will help them transition from being gamers to being students,” he explained. “This will get online students familiar with doing historical research and being a university student. There won’t be any textbooks or tests. It will be project-focused and based on the experiences they had playing the game with our additional content.”
This purpose of this second group project is to relate the concepts of the text to present organizations. Each Team will select an organization or create an organization and present on that organization. The focus of this project is sustainability, and accounts for 30% of the grade. The presentation will consist of 20 to 30 minutes, a presentation of 10 to slides 20 slides, complete with a 10-15-page paper. The presentation and paper will be due electronically prior to class. Members will be graded on 50% contribution and 50 % presentation. The objective of this exercise is to develop skills in working as a team as well as developing your presentation skills.
The paper shall address the following analysis to the selected organization:
The firm may a service or manufacturing firm, or one that you create.
Relate each Chapter of the book (minimum twelve chapter relationships)
The relationship could be made from a topic within that chapter.
All projects must be uploaded in D2L/Brightspace by start of class, 9:30 AM, March 30, 2021
Why Keyword Searching?
Why not just type in a phrase or sentence like you do in Google or Yahoo!?
Because most electronic databases store and retrieve information differently than Internet search engines.
A databases searches fields within a collection of records. These fields include the information commonly found in a citation plus an abstract (if available) and subject headings. Search engines search web content which is typically the full text of sources.
The bottom line: you get better results in a database by using effective keyword search strategies.
To develop an effective search strategy, you need to:
determine the key concepts in your topic and
develop a good list of keyword synonyms.
Why use synonyms?
Because there is more than one way to express a concept or idea. You don’t know if the article you’re looking for uses the same expression for a key concept that you are using.
Consider: Will an author use:
Hypertension or High Blood Pressure?
Teach or Instruct?
Therapy or Treatment?
Class assignment (5-10 Min)
Share keywords related to the Engineering Management Project
Getting Ready for Research (15-20 min)
Library Resources vs. the Internet (do we need to discuss?)
walk together through the eBooks dbases to figure out logins and search techniques.
Personal work with the librarian (5 min each student)
using the list of keywords and the information sources, collaborate with the librarian to find 3-5 references for your project
Services like Chegg have become more accessible to students during unproctored exams in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, causing what UO chemistry professor Shannon Boettcher believes is a “huge problem with academic dishonesty across the nation in the light of remote learning and COVID-19.”
he Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice and takedown process requires that service providers remove material that a copyright owner identifies on their website through a valid notice of copyright infringement or become subject to potential secondary liability for assisting with copyright infringement, according to Copyright Alliance.
Chegg Inc. has been sued twice in federal court for claims of copyright infringement, denying allegations in both instances.
Apart from its subscription services, Chegg rents and sells textbooks. The publishing company John Wiley & Sons Inc. filed a lawsuit against Chegg on Dec. 18, 2018, in Manhattan U.S. District Court, alleging that Chegg sold counterfeit versions of its textbooks.
+++++++++++
This $12 Billion Company Is Getting Rich Off Students Cheating Their Way Through Covid
Chegg is based in Santa Clara, California, but the heart of its operation is in India, where it employs more than 70,000 experts with advanced math, science, technology and engineering degrees. The experts, who work freelance, are online 24/7, supplying step-by-step answers to questions posted by subscribers (sometimes answered in less than 15 minutes).
Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig has profited handsomely. His holdings in Chegg plus after-tax proceeds from stock sales add up to $300 million. Rosensweig, who declined to speak to Forbes,has said that Chegg Study was “not built” for cheating. He describes it instead as the equivalent of an asynchronous, always-on tutor, ready to help students with detailed answers to problems. In a 2019 interview, he said higher education needs to adjust to the on-demand economy, the way Uber or Amazon have.
Throughout the pandemic, schools have spent millions on remote proctoring, a controversial practice in which colleges pay private companies like Honorlock and Examity to surveil students while they take tests.
Chegg Study was enjoying steady growth and little competition. Its only serious rival, privately held Course Hero, is a much smaller operation, valued at $1.1 billion, that generates most of its answers from students.
My note:
such proliferation would not have been possible, if the middle and upper administration has been more supportive of faculty when misconduct is detected. If the administration turns blind eye due to “enrollment” and “retention” priorities and curbs faculty reports regarding academic dishonesty, the industry naturally fills out the gap between a mere syllabus statement and inability to act upon it.
There is plenty of lipservice regarding “personalized learning,” but the reality is overworked faculty, who do not have the opportunity to spend sufficient time with students, less to educate them about plagiarism, cheating and similar “auxiliary” trends besides the content of the course.
Mike Silagadze isn’t shy about his desire to take market share from the largest college textbook publishers through his classroom software company Top Hat. He believes his company’s brand of digital textbooks beats anything Pearson, McGraw-Hill and their ilk can provide.
Founded in 2009, Top Hat claims that 2.7 million students access its digital course materials, including those at 750 of the top 1,000 higher education institutions in North America.
Silagadze believes younger faculty members and future generations of college students will help drive institutions to adopt digital materials instead of print.
Top Hat has challenged tangible goods for a long time now. Its first offering was a digital version of clickers to measure student responses in the classroom. In 2017, the company launched a marketplace for e-textbooks, working with authors and offering openly licensed content from the likes of OpenStax as well.
Last year, the company ceased sales of individual assessment tools to instead offer a bundle of its products. Students pay $48 for one year of Top Hat’s products. Interactive textbooks on Top Hat cost an average of $35.