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"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. "

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.

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.

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

"If you don't have DRM, it opens up strategies that aren't available to you if you insist on DRM," says Shatzkin. "The question is: Is the fear of piracy greater than the fear of Amazon?"

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.

"Logically, e-textbooks should be much cheaper than the print options available to students--but they're not. CT looks at the rationale behind their pricing, and the market factors at play."

"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.

Disrupting Ourselves, The Problem of Learning in Higher Education

Great article by Randy Bass. There is a reference to the eportfolio model that C2L is starting to create. He also aligns eportfolios and PLE's. [E-portfolios, or Personal Learning Environments (PLEs), or whatever they are named-as something that enables students to weave these connections back and forth across the formal and experiential curricula-will be an essential element of our response to this disruptive moment. Randy also mentions the emerging discussions about learning analytics.