Ebooks at Liberal Arts Colleges

" Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) recently decided to take a novel approach to reducing textbook costs for its students by reworking its contracts not with the companies that sell books, but rather those that control the bookstores."

"49 percent of SNHU students either buy their textbooks someplace other than the campus bookstore or do not buy them at all." - wow.

Open becomes "affordable." Hmmm.

The following are my notes from the presentation - Born accessible: making e-books fully inclusive from day one - held during the NISO- The E-Book Renaissance Part II: Challenges and Opportunities. Best efforts were made to ensure accuracy.

"Welcome to the Digital History Reader, an online learning experience designed to enable students to develop the analytical skills employed by historians. The Reader presents key events in U.S. and European history in the format of self-contained modules. Students learn by exploring the data presented, evaluating conflicting accounts or interpretations, and developing their own conclusions based on the evidence provided."

Very good catch, as an exemplar. Note the absence of Apple products. And the way he misses class in that Waldorf story.

"The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has accused Educause, a higher education IT association, and technology community Internet2 of ignoring the "accessibility barriers" that are preventing blind and print-disabled students from fully participating in a major e-text pilot initiative being coordinated by both."

Ouch. This happened while NFB was already communicating with Educause and I2?

Very cool idea. Would be interesting for a version of that to be given to a single campus population.

"Brad Miller and David Ranum have opened up their eBook for general use at their new http://interactivepython.org site. This is the book whose use we have been studying for the last year as part of our CSLearning4U effort. It's a great alternative to the Udacity/Coursera model of distance education, to make a book more like a course, rather than capture the course in video. "

"We get the chance to beat the book for CS learning! Our NSF CE21 (Computing Education in the 21st Century) proposal was funded for about $990K from October 1, 2011 to September 30, 2013. The goal of this project is to create new media for learning computer science at a distance by high school teachers. We are pursuing the correspondence school model of distance learning, rather than a remote classroom model, in Sir John Daniel's terms. We want to create a medium that can be studied, within the time constraints of high school teachers (or others, like people re-entering the IT workforce.) A key idea is that we can design instruction, following principles of educational psychology, to help people learn computing better. "

" Books work. Let's make books better. Why build off lectures? Why try to "take over" courses?"

""There is no e-reader that supports what we found these students doing," said first author Alex Thayer, a UW doctoral student in Human Centered Design and Engineering. "It remains to be seen how to design one. Its a great space to get into, theres a lot of opportunity.""

Good analysis of what Amazon's September moves accomplish.

That's definitely growing. No liberal arts institutions, though.

"In the good-old days when print was the only option, students had plenty of free or cheap ways to get required textbooks. Borrow one from a friend. Check out a copy from the library. Buy a used copy for a fraction of the price. Or rent a copy through one of several companies providing that service. But the latest textbook enhancements, which require individual access codes to get to bonus materials online, threaten to displace all of those alternatives. Most access codes are good only for a limited time, and once they are activated they can't be used by other students."

"An electronic edition comprised of a selection of scholarly reflections from doctoral candidates on the Digital Arts & Humanities Ph.D. programme, which is part of the Digital Academy at University College Cork, Ireland."

Why iTunes, I wonder. To hit iOS mobile devices? Reduce local hosting burdens?

" Unfortunately, in the case of Mike Tracy, a highly-regarded animator who'd been teaching at the Art Institute of California-Orange County for the past 11 years, refusing to make students buy an e-book they don't need may have cost him his job."

I wonder where this occurs beyond the for-profit space.

"Several universities have recently tried a new model for delivering textbooks in hopes of saving students money: requiring purchase of e-textbooks and charging students a materials fee to cover the costs. A recent report on some of those pilot projects, however, shows that many students find the e-textbooks "clumsy" and prefer print."