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"Many institutions have invested substantial resources in diverse initiatives to deliver distance learning and/or enhance campus-based learning with online resources. To these institutional efforts, faculty and students are now adding online tools and resources from beyond the campus. Higher education institutions are confronting the need to connect these various efforts to create more powerful and integrated learning experiences for all of their students. In this interview, Brian Hughes, Director of Social Media at the Teacher's College at Columbia University, discusses the issues surrounding social media integration."

"these days when we say "textbook" we seldom mean textbook. We mean course materials. As the Vox article makes clear, the book is not always (not usually?) the hideously expensive part of the deal - the online access codes and other ancillary materials are. Certainly, there are amazingly expensive books out there that get assigned in classes (I hear law books are hundreds of dollars, I know some economics books are, some science books, etc. Even in Literature, a relatively inexpensive field, big anthologies can be pricey). But often - and maybe even usually - when we complain about the cost of books, we're complaining about the cost of supplemental media, password-protected websites, and other items that may include text but are certainly not books. The term "Open Educational Resources" recognizes this. It's a strange habit of language that has kept us from parallelism, though: What OERs oppose is not textbooks, but CERs, Closed Educational Resources."

"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."