"several of the Kaleidoscope schools started using the rSmart Academic LMS, built on the Sakai open academic environment, which allows faculty to pull Kaleidoscope modules into their courses and add localizations. It also allows users to access the reservoir of openly licensed, shared content used in the Kaleidoscope courses. "This is the only LMS designed for the era of open sharing of content and a collaborative approach to curriculum design, so it could not be a more perfect match," says Thanos. "It allows for social connections and you can bring your academic content into your profile." "

"The university president has expressed interest in the idea of exploring mechanisms for professors to publish textbooks online, and to receive appropriate academic credit for it," Mr. Carey said.

Bookboon makes its digital textbooks available free to college students, has taken the approach of funding its work by including advertising within the pages of the books.

The partnership will expand the reach of the McGraw-Hill Campus service, which was first rolled out last July as a means of offering universal, single sign-on access to McGraw-Hill offerings to students and educators from within a school's existing LMS at no cost. With the service, the entire library of McGraw-Hill resources can be accessed with the service with a single click for browsing of test banks, e-books, PowerPoint slides and other offerings.

In this project, McGraw-Hill will provide e-books and access to software, such as McGraw-Hill's adaptive learning system, LearnSmart, and the university will pay a "significantly discounted flat fee" for the materials. In addition, Western Governors will also pay the company a premium for each student who uses the materials and receives a B or better grade in the course.

"Minnesota launched an online catalog of open-source books last month and will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books."

"In that model, the institution negotiates a deep discount off the list price of the textbook in order to have access to an e-text edition. In return for the discount, the university guarantees that every single student in the course will buy the e-text, which is charged like a lab fee. This is a definite change from the current textbook model, in which each student is personally responsible for showing up to class armed with the textbook, either in printed or digital form."

The University of California, Irvine OpenCourseWare is now offering four new courses in Public Health, Physics, and Chemistry on iTunes U. iTunes U provides users with free public access to lectures, videos, books, podcasts, and courses from colleges and universities across the globe. Users can download the content to their iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch with the iTunes U app.

"Princeton, Penn and Michigan will join Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley as partners of Coursera, a company founded earlier this year by the Stanford engineering professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. Using Coursera's platform, the universities will produce free, online versions of their courses that anyone can take."

Discovery Education's new "Techbooks" are more than just digitized versions of static textbooks, the Techbooks include videos, embedded assessments, and other interactive features that leverage the power of the internet. "Our framework recognizes that coupling informational text with multi-modal content on the same topic, at varying reading levels, provides an unparalleled experience for 21st-century learners. "

I believe this is the analytics platform mentioned in the demo this morning.

List of Learning Analytic Resources - Educause, ELI Focus Session April 2012