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"Affordable content is a choice. It's a choice that many students have made in recent years as they've sought alternatives to higher-priced textbook and courseware products. But it is also a choice for faculty, and informing and persuading instructors to make this choice remains a major obstacle to ensuring that affordable content is adopted widely in Higher Education."

"The National University System, for example, is developing  a variety of initiatives aimed at bringing down the cost of a degree, including through FlexCourse?, a teaching and learning platform that offers faculty-supported, variably-paced online degree programs at an affordable price point of $8,500 annual tuition. The platform is initially being offered in conjunction with John F. Kennedy University, through JFKU Online --  both part of the National University System."

ducation without limits begins a much needed discussion," Foreman said. "As public education is eviscerated in urban cores and debt burdens college students in a limited job market for decades after graduation, many agree that we need to discuss an invigorated public education system that makes education available for everyone, not just those who can afford it."

"A service of the USF Tampa Library, the Textbook Affordability Project (TAP) helps counter the rising cost of an education by connecting students and faculty with alternatives to full-price textbooks."

"Publishers claim that new technologies, like digital textbooks and Netflix-style subscription services, make textbooks more affordable for all. But affordability advocates say that if anyone is to blame for the fact that textbook costs have risen more than 1,000 percent since the 1970s, it's the publishers - and, advocates claim, these new technologies are publishers' attempt to maintain their stranglehold on the industry while disguising it as reform."

Findings of the study indicated that faculty are more aware of textbook affordability issues than they used to be, though they see the appropriateness of materials as the most important factor when it comes to choosing resources to use in a course.

What we saw today is what our classrooms will look like once iPads are far cheaper, once digital textbooks can be handed down as easily as physical ones, once teachers of every subject have several educational material options to choose among. For now though, it's important to remember that "new" and "different" always come at a premium. One that the vast majority of us can't afford.

A new bill introduced in the U.S. Senate seeks to tackle the rising cost of textbooks by giving states an incentive to experiment with open educational resources. The Affordable College Textbook Act, introduced by U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Al Franken, Democrats of Illinois and Minnesota, respectively, would create a grant program that would fund the creation of new textbooks -- as long as they are made available for free online.

"Pathway tuition, which varies by area, is set by local LDS authorities to make it an "affordable stretch," Griffith said. In Mexico, students pay $35 per credit hour, while students in Ghana pay $20. The cost can be kept so low because Pathway is a branch of online education at BYU-I, which is self-sustaining, says Griffith. It's also because buildings used for Pathway are already owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, professors are already employed by BYU-I, senior mentor couples serve unpaid and no marketing is needed thanks to word-of-mouth and ecclesiastical leader referrals. "Part of the blessing of this program is it's not about the church or BYU-Idaho making money … it's about providing an education," Griffith said."

" In Boston, for example, the average cost of renting a two-bedroom apartment is $2,821, which means that you would need to earn $120,900 a year just to afford it"

"Student debt in the U.S. has reached record levels, making higher education out of reach for many people. In New York City, a program called ASAP is gaining national attention for helping students earn a college degree and escape the burden of loans they would struggle to repay."

The course management system (CMS) reinforces the status quo and hinders substantial teaching and learning innovation in higher education. It does so by imposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process. The open learning network (OLN)-a hybrid of the CMS and the personal learning environment (PLE)-is proposed as an alternative learning technology environment with the potential to leverage the affordances of the Web to dramatically improve learning.

"The Internet affords children endless opportunities to get into serious trouble, downloading what they shouldn't download, looking at what they shouldn't be looking at, and getting ideas about what they shouldn't be getting ideas about. But the good news is that if your kids are like mine, they may be doing some or all of those things... but there's another use for the Internet that's attracting their time and attention. It's called teaching."

First of all, what is the "it" that I am referring to? "It" is a transformed reality where access to new tools, abundant content, and vast networks simultaneously provide countless new affordances and associated challenges.

"Current students who take the free online college courses can earn certificates of completion, but not college credit. However, if MOOCs are determined to be close enough to traditional college courses as to become eligible for academic credit, they could make higher education more affordable and accessible, Ms. Lewin writes."

The rationale for seeking open terms of both access and use is as follows. Free access provides the literature to at least five overlapping audiences: researchers who happen upon open-access research articles while browsing the Web rather than a password-protected database; researchers at institutions that cannot afford the subscription prices for the growing literature; researchers in disciplines other than that of a journal's intended audience, who would not otherwise subscribe; patients, their families, students, and other members of the public with an interest in the information but without the means to subscribe; and researchers' computers running text-mining software to analyze the literature. In addition, granting readers full reuse rights unleashes the full range of human creativity for translating, combining, analyzing, adapting, and preserving the scientific record, whereas traditional copyright arrangements in scientific publishing increasingly inhibit scholarly communication.

Open education is about sharing, reducing barriers and increasing access in education. It includes free and open access to platforms, tools and resources in education (such as learning materials, course materials, videos of lectures, assessment tools, research, study groups, textbooks, etc.). Open education seeks to create a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire.

Washtenaw Community College is the first community college in Michigan to put a textbook-free learning program in place. The Kaleidoscope Project uses open educational resources - basically online textbooks - to help make higher education more affordable. She says the project will be in place in one reading and one intermediate algebra class this fall, but the hope is that it can be expanded in the future.

"His positive view about online education was strongly supported in a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll. Among the registered voters who participated in the survey, 59% said they agreed with the idea that increasing the number of online classes at California's public universities will make education more affordable and accessible. However, 34% expressed fears that expanding online classes will reduce access to professors, diminish the value of college degrees and not save money."