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"the best chance to make an immediate and meaningful impact on the price of textbooks is to facilitate the merging of traditional and free content, allowing instructors to include exactly what is necessary, and freeing students from the rigid and expensive traditional offerings from academic publishers. In this model, "book" costs are lowered regardless of output format. If we are cognizant of ways of merging different types of content in order to get the biggest academic bang for the buck, we must also be mindful of methods to access this content; to break it apart, to "disaggregate" it from the traditional bounds of textbooks and to present it to students in an effective manner."

Warning: This is a vendor perspective...

I believe there are 3 needs in modern literacy that we cannot ignore as educators. Digital literacy is not an "option" anymore. Most of the texts that we read each day appear on a screen, complete with embedded media, advertisements, and hyperlinks. Navigating these spaces is required to function successfully in modern society. We should immerse our students in these mediums, and provide them guidance to maximize their learning. Digital texts foster curation and recall. When I read texts in hard copy, I often annotate using words and images. This helps me to make meaning of the text in the moment that I'm reading it. However, when I read digital texts, my annotations and sketches are automatically added to my intellectual database in Evernote. My database is fully searchable by content and tag. Therefore, when I need citations, information, or ideas to guide my writing, I most often return to the digital sources, ideas, and phrases captured in my database. In short, texts in hard copy make an impact, but digital texts shape my thinking and writing more often. Teachers need to teach students to digital and hard copy texts equally. Existing resources coupled with teacher comfort levels often reduce the amount of instruction that students receive regarding digital texts. In fact, a teacher recently told me that "you just can't get the same experience from a Kindle as you can from a hardback book." Really? We need to get comfortable with digital texts ourselves and share the process meaningfully with students.

The Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) is an inter-disciplinary network of leading international researchers who are exploring the role and impact of analytics on teaching, learning, training and development.