EET Learns

"A month or so before back-to-school season begins in earnest, Amazon has jumped into the lucrative college textbook market with Kindle Textbook Rental. Amazon claims students can save as much as 80% off textbook list prices by renting from the Kindle Store. The company is offering tens of thousands of textbooks, which students can rent for periods ranging from 30 to 360 days. Amazon has also extended its Whispersnyc technology so that students can access all their notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, even after the rental agreement is over."

Textbook rentals at up to 80% off the hard copy price. Wow!

"Have you ever said to yourself, "I really should do something about this course, but..."?? This web site is designed to provide practical and effective help for faculty members interested in designing or redesigning a course."

"Four major textbook providers-Cengage, Macmillan, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons-today announced that they will build tighter links between their advanced e-textbook platforms and Blackboard's popular course-management system. Blackboard announced a similar deal with McGraw-Hill last year. So the company now has partnerships with the five dominant textbook publishers. For students, a major benefit will be the ability to get to the publishers' e-textbooks and online assignments through the campus network without having to create new logins and passwords. For professors, the new links will make it easier to push students' grades on online quizzes from the publishers' e-textbook systems to the gradebook they use on the Blackboard system."

This is a real plus for BB.

"The Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University is pleased to announce our 2011 Centennial Symposium on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, November 10-12, 2011 in Banff Alberta Canada. This gathering of teacher/scholars is a "practitioners conference" dedicated to developing individual and collaborative teaching and learning scholarship, sharing nascent data and findings, going public with compelling results of completed research projects, and building an extended scholarly community. The goals of this event, and the Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Mount Royal University, include understanding and improving student learning through systematic scholarly inquiry and building collective knowledge for the future."

"Too often assessment is an additional chore to be completed for compliance and reporting reasons. Waypoint Outcomes builds software that streamlines the interactions between learners and teachers. The results can mean a dramatically improved dialog about outcomes and rich data on student learning. Tightly integrated with Blackboard, Moodle, and Blackboard Vista or used as a stand-alone tool, Waypoint® helps educators improve the quality of feedback to students on authentic tasks and build a culture of continuous improvement."

"This development is getting a great deal of attention in the OER community as well as by the Creative Commons movement which supports REA and open education. If adopted the legislation would require open access for any federally subsidized or funded educational works to be made available through an open license."

"The small liberal-arts college in this Pennsylvania town offers students an intimate learning experience. There is one professor for every eight students, each of whom pays about $40,000 for that kind of access. Now the college wants to add courses that are partly online into this setting, and it wants other liberal-arts institutions to follow suit."

Instructional Design Resources

OER repository

"U of C Student Success Centre Goes Mobile Students at the University of Calgary can stay connected to services offered by their Student Success Centre (SSC) with a new custom mobile application. The application allows students to read recent news, to register for workshops or seminars, to book appointments with advisors, writing tutors, career and academic development specialists, and to access the SSC events calendar 24/7. "We are committed to effective communication with students and to making it easy for them to access the programs and services we offer," says Joel Wilkinson, Director of the Student Success Centre. "Most students do almost everything online and our new application will allow them to stay connected with the resources and events available to support their path to success." The application was developed by the company 4abyte Inc., which was founded by Charles Newton Price, a recent U of C graduate student. "We were pleased to be part of this project," says Charles. "Given the prominent presence of smartphones on campus, going mobile has become indispensible for post-secondary institutions." SSC's sharp, attractive, and easy application, available for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry Torch devices, adds to the University of Calgary's steps to remain at the forefront of student engagement. The application is available for download on iTunes (iPhone only) or via the SSC website at: http://ucalgary.ca/ssc "

"A big part of Mohawk College president Rob MacIsaac's vision for the school is making postsecondary education accessible to everyone by making resources available online, around the clock. MacIsaac says he's committed to ensuring Mohawk is relevant to today's economy and stays that way. "

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OER site from BCcampus