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"Ms. Morgan borrows the phrase "free-range learning" to describe students' behavior, and she finds that they generally shop around for content in places educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to materials from other universities. They mention lecture videos from Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology far more than the widely publicized Khan Academy, she says."

"students also share their textbooks because they are so incredibly expensive. And as the digital rights management (DRM) restrictions on e-books makes lending someone your copy difficult if not impossible, students are likely steering away from e-books because they simply don't work for them - practically or economically."

Before you engage in risky grad school enrollment, remember that you run a high risk of contracting a student loan. And once you've come down with one of those, it's almost impossible to clean up.

"In an effort to reduce costs for students, the College of Education and Human Development has created this catalog of open textbooks to be reviewed by faculty members. Open textbooks are complete textbooks released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license. Instructors can customize open textbooks to fit their course needs by remixing, editing, and adding their own content. Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks."

"The legislature finds the state's recent adoption of common core K-12 standards provides an opportunity to develop high-quality, openly licensed K-12 courseware that is aligned with these standards. By developing this library of openly licensed courseware and making it available to school districts free of charge, the state and school districts will be able to provide students with curricula and texts while substantially reducing the expenses that districts would otherwise incur in purchasing these materials. In addition, this library of openly licensed courseware will provide districts and students with a broader selection of materials, and materials that are more up-to-date."

"Private companies, like Phoenix, have been offering online degrees for a fee for years. And schools like M.I.T. and Stanford have been offering lectures for free online. Coursera is the next step: building an interactive platform that will allow the best schools in the world to not only offer a wide range of free course lectures online, but also a system of testing, grading, student-to-student help and awarding certificates of completion of a course for under $100. (Sounds like a good deal. Tuition at the real-life Stanford is over $40,000 a year.) Coursera is starting with 40 courses online - from computing to the humanities - offered by professors from Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. "

The OpenScout project invites you to a series of four webinars showing you how you can take full advantage of Business and Management Open Educational Resources (OER). Do you also recognize a growing need to improve your Business and Management skills but are confronted with a lack of time or financial resources to keep up with the latest developments? Are you a student in Business and would like to learn with high-quality, up-to-date, yet free learning materials? Are you a teacher of Business and Management and would like to re-use or adapt existing learning materials of competent peers to enhance your learning offerings? Are you a Business and Management institution looking for new distribution channels for your open learning materials?

"From our perspective, we view textbook publishers as highly exploitative," Justin Goss, a student senator at UC Davis, told members of the Senate Education Committee. "While I am sure that they are perfectly nice people, it continues to baffle me why a reordered table of contents and a shiny new binding warrants and additional $50, $60, or sometimes $100 on the price tag."

In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans - one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world - Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.

"Today Polish Council of Ministers adopted regulation concerning the implementation of „Digital School" program for computerization of Polish schools and raising ICT competences. Pilot of the project aimed for 380 schools in Poland will equip them with hardware (tablets, computers for students, additional equipment). Also digital and free (under Creative Commons Attribution or compatible) textbooks for grades 4-6 in primary schools (K4-K6) will be created (43 millions PLN is assigned for textbooks). This is the first major government project in Poland which creates Open Educational Resources especially textbooks."

"Copyright is a federal law, and generally when state laws conflict with federal laws, federal law wins," Schultz said. "Perhaps more important is there's a First Amendment issue as well. If I take notes in class, and I want to share them, that's speech."

"By requiring students to grapple with primary sources and find their own journal articles, she said, she could teach in a way that emphasized process rather than memorization of facts in a book."

Ebook standards may lack the glamour that the technology attracts, but the arrival of ePub3 has the potential to transform how the academy creates and delivers its content to students and researchers. Just weeks into the New Year and already there is a new ebooks revelation that colleges and universities need to digest. January saw the launch of Apple's new iBooks2 software which grabbed headlines (see the BBC article here) and sparked heated debate across the academic community. Quietly underpinning the technology of the iBooks software is ePub.  ePub is the 'defacto' ebook standard, with the latest version of ePub3 supporting complex layouts and rich media and interactivity for eTextbooks and professional and scientific publications.

Open Access Rights Coalition

There is a growing premium placed on data related to student performance, progress to degree, and prospects after graduation. These measures relative to the cost of attendance seems to equal value these days.