How badges and portfolios collide.

"The startup's been hit with a lawsuit from Pearson, Cengage, and Macmillan, accusing it of copyright infringement. While Boundless Learning says that it's working with OER content and the OER community to create a free learning platform, the publishers contend that the startup "steals the creative expression of others, willfully and blatantly violating the Plaintiffs' intellectual property rights in several of their highest profile, signature textbooks.""

In this session, we'll briefly describe Indiana University's e-text agreements with five publishers and with Courseload, the provider of the e-text e-reader software. These agreements are resulting in substantial cost savings for students and providing them with new tools for teaching and learning. The IU agreements evolved from two years of pilot testing and in response to substantial input from students, faculty, textbook publishers, and authors. We will also discuss how these agreements can be extended to other institutions through short- and long-term pilot programs, which will allow them to gather valuable data about student and faculty use of e-texts.

"Let's look at some of the current e-textbook providers and how they compare on key points."

"STEPP was launched by the Alternative Media Access Center, in partnership with CourseSmart and the AccessText Network, through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education (DoEd), Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). This program is designed to meet the textbook rental needs of any postsecondary student and aims to help improve low-cost access to higher education textbooks for all students, including those with print-related disabilities. "

Textbooks By Course | New & Used Books, eBooks, Rent Books Help your student body save big on textbooks. Create a completely free textbook exchange to let students trade books to each other.

ComETS is an Iowa State University community that promotes dialog and events focused on technology in learning & teaching. ComETS is a university-wide community where ideas and resources can be shared, and debate can occur on future technology directions at ISU.

See the eText Panel Discussion.

"The third thing we think is exciting is our analytics platform, which lets students and teachers track what's occurring on an individual level to be able to see everything from how a student is performing overall in math, to how they're performing specifically within algebra and within linear equations, to how they're doing on specific problems. "

Dive in with Duke University's Cachalot app, a novel digital textbook designed for students enrolled in Duke's Marine Megafauna class, but free for everyone, everywhere.

As virtually every form of media from newspapers to television shows becomes more socially aware, the book remains stubbornly anti-social. Despite the rapid growth in e-books and the launch of a number of services designed to add social features to books, the act of reading is still a fairly solitary thing.

The bigger issue is the breakdown in the process that led to this problem. If we don't fix this, then we will experience another breakdown in the future. It's virtually guaranteed. As the philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Why don't students like electronic textbooks if they like ebooks? The two differ. Ebooks typically often have a narrative structure,  they are usually pretty easy to read, and we read them for pleasure. Textbooks in contrast, have a hierarchical structure, the material is difficult and unfamiliar, and we read them for learning and retention. Students likely interact with textbooks differently than books they read for pleasure.

"To help you make sense of the transition, we've assembled our experts to explain where digital course materials will likely gain traction first; our philosophy about the two ways digital will evolve; and Follett's predictions for the near and long-term future of digital learning. "

The purpose of this document is two-fold: - to offer an online history of the development of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) - to use that history to describe major elements of a MOOC

In a few slides, he'd spelled out the nine essential components of a university education: admissions, lectures, peer interaction, professor interaction, problem-solving, assignments, exams, deadlines, and certification. While Thrun admired MIT's OpenCourseWare-the university's decade-old initiative to publish online all of its lectures, syllabi, and homework from 2,100 courses-he thought it relied too heavily on videos of actual classroom lectures. That was tapping just one-ninth of the equation, with a bit of course material thrown in as a bonus.

Making an e-book can be easy-almost trivially easy-using Pandoc, a tool I've written about earlier on ProfHacker. Of course, Pandoc isn't the only way to do this. Mark has used Sigil and written about it, and another good option is Anthologize, which Julie wrote about.

Salon is a high-power web platform where users can read, annotate, and discuss visual media.