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if FWK (or other organizations) can find sustainability while distributing free digital textbooks, the textbook market could be dramatically altered. Because it is so hard to compete with "free," textbook prices would likely come down and eventually become only a small part of the cost of higher education. The potential for the disruption of the textbook publishing industry, as well as the potential savings to students, is enormous if one or more organizations can create a sustainable business model. Whether this can be done remains to be seen.

"The Course Builder open source project is an experimental early step for us in the world of online education. It is a snapshot of an approach we found useful and an indication of our future direction. We hope to continue development along these lines, but we wanted to make this limited code base available now, to see what early adopters will do with it, and to explore the future of learning technology."

Now, with $16 million in venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the two professors officially launched Coursera, their new online education company that includes partnerships with Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania to offer web-based classes on the Coursera platform for free. A total of 37 undergraduate and graduate-level courses across a broad range of disciplines will launch this spring.

"Developing an eText strategy that will serve the needs of institutions, faculty, and students requires thoughtful planning. This presentation will use the Indiana University experience as a case study to explore the strategic, business, and policy issues that institutions should consider when exploring an institutional eText strategy or considering an eText initiative."

Big data, it seems, is everywhere-even in education. Researchers and developers of online learning systems, intelligent tutoring systems, virtual labs, simulations, games and learning management systems are exploring ways to better understand and use data from learners' activities online to improve teaching and learning.

"A free-to-use font designed to help people with dyslexia read online content is gaining favour. OpenDyslexic's characters have been given "heavy-weighted bottoms" to prevent them from flipping and swapping around in the minds of their readers."

"Higher education is facing a variety of conflicting challenges. National and state competitiveness depend on a citizenry with postsecondary education. Large segments of the population traditionally have not had equal access to higher education, and this is particularly true for minorities and the economically disadvantaged, two groups that also suffer disproportionally from another of higher education's challenges-students coming to higher education without adequate preparation. This bulletin describes an analytics system that Bowie State University (BSU) has implemented and is enhancing in order to improve the retention and success of at-risk students. While BSU has a substantial population of such students, the approaches taken are broadly applicable since many institutions have students in this category."

"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."

"The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is pleased to host a gathering of interested parties to identify and discuss solutions to the challenge facing us with etextbooks and their adoption in higher education."

Check out the "why this matters", public vs private discussion.

"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."

"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 Central Florida has chosen Canvas from Instructure to replace Blackboard Vista as the institution's learning management system. The decision came after a six-month evaluation process that reviewed Desire2Learn, Blackboard 9.1, and Instructure Canvas. "

The majority of students in the Udacity and Coursera courses analyzed were professionals in the software industry - hardly the target audience for those seeking a change in how we educate postsecondary students. The current MOOCs provide a nice proof-of-concept, but hardly solve significant educational problems.

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.

"A new service at Purdue, however, called BoilerBackpack, will give students, faculty and staff 100 gigabytes of personal storage, so everyone at Purdue will have a large amount of space to store their digital stuff. And that's just the first step in a new partnership between Purdue and storage giant EMC Corp."

Data mining hinges on one reality about life on the Web: what you do there leaves behind a trail of digital breadcrumbs. Companies scoop those up to tailor services, like the matchmaking of eHarmony or the book recommendations of Amazon. Now colleges, eager to get students out the door more efficiently, are awakening to the opportunities of so-called Big Data.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is stepping up its investment in innovative delivery models in higher education, announcing $9-million in grants today to support a range of new approaches. Among the awards is the foundation's first contribution to so-called MOOC's, or Massive Open Online Courses, where professors let anyone online take their courses, sometimes attracting tens of thousands of learners. Specifically, the Gates Foundation is giving $1-million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for its MITx project, which offers such open courses.

But now Ms. Finnegan is working to get the book digitally back in circulation, by collaborating with Unglue.it, a Kickstarter-inspired publishing start-up that opened last month. Oral Literature is featured as one of the site's five inaugural campaigns, which ask users to pledge money toward "ungluing" each previously published work. If the campaign is successful, Oral Literature will be available as a free, legal e-book, downloadable from anywhere in the world. Ungluing "is not really buying the rights, and it's not really buying the license," said Eric Hellman, Unglue.it's founder. "It's compensating the rights-holder in exchange for them releasing something with Creative Commons."

"E-textbooks show signs of finally gaining traction, although they still account for a smaller share of all textbook purchases than any method of acquiring a print textbook. Twenty percent of students in this year's survey either bought or "rented" an e-textbook this spring. Over all, electronic versions accounted for 9 percent of all textbook purchases."