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Instructure today announced it has raised $30 million in Series D funding, which brings Instructure's lifetime funding total to $50 million. Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) led the round with participation from existing investors. The funds will be used to accelerate adoption of Canvas, Instructure's popular learning management system (LMS), used by colleges, universities, K-12 school districts and the company's expanding role in the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) movement. Instructure's current list of investors includes EPIC Ventures, OpenView Venture Partners and Tomorrow Venture

Open access as the default sounds ambitious, but is consistent with recent trends, particularly for research funded by taxpayers. A growing number of governments and funding agencies have already embraced mandatory open access requirements, recognizing that if the public funds the research, it is entitled to access the results.

To ensure that the Federal investment of these funds has as broad an impact as possible and to encourage innovation in the development of new learning materials, as a condition of the receipt of a Ready to Work grant, the grantee will be required to license to the public all work (except for computer software source code, discussed below) created with the support of the grant under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) license. Work that must be licensed under the CC BY includes both new content created with the grant funds and modifications made to pre-existing, grantee-owned content using grant funds.

"Google has funded an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Education to develop a "Big Open Online Course," or BOOC. Daniel Hickey will offer a free course in September focused on educators and titled "Assessment Practices, Principles and Policies" for as many as 500 students, funded by a $50,000 Google grant."

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.

"The Federal Government currently invests billions of taxpayer dollars each year in programs that include the creation of educational, training, and instructional materials through grants, contracts, and other cooperative agreements. This investment produces educational resources ranging from innovative curricular resources to workforce training materials to English language learning tools. While these materials are created for the public good, they are generally not open to the members of the public who paid for them. At a time when educational opportunity, workforce development and access to knowledge are critical to America's future, these valuable publicly-funded resources should be openly available to students, teachers, businesses, workers and the public to use in new and innovative ways."

"There's been much debate in recent years about the role of public colleges in an era when students pay for more than half their education in most states. Sure, state funds might make up less than 10 percent of the budget at the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan, and Berkeley, but the fact of the matter is that most public colleges couldn't survive if not for their states."

"In the business world, this is called outsourcing. Perhaps the colleges that utilize this model never would have hired anyone to teach those courses in the first place. Perhaps not. What we can be certain of though is that as long as this option is available, these small colleges will never be fully funded again."

WCC will offer two classes next semester with readings available online for free instead of textbooks with high price tags. The courses - one reading course and one math course - typically have high enrollment and high textbook costs. The offerings are part of the Kaleidoscope Project, a grant-based initiative funded by Next Generation Learning Challenges.

"Held April 11-12, 2013, The Saylor Foundation's invitation-only Digital Education Conference (#DigEdCon) 2013 brought together a range of stakeholders in funding, philanthropy, technology, academia, and open education. These diverse friends of digital education convened over one of education's largest looming issues: how innovators must collaborate-and cooperate-to provide the highest quality education to all."

A state-funded project to create low-cost digital textbooks for community-college courses has saved students about $5 million in just a few years, advocates say.

I've published this paper in a journal called Science and Public Policy - a conventional way of being read by other academics. Except that whatever baroque negotiations have taken place between the journal's new publisher and the UCL library mean that, despite being a member staff at one of Europe's largest universities, I don't seem to have access to that journal. This piece of research, funded by British taxpayers, can't even be read by me.

"The advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field," says Cathy Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who in her former role at the Hewlett Foundation provided seed funding for MIT's project. "We're changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge.""

"At their best, digital textbooks offer a learning experience that boosts engagement, adapts to student learning, tracks performance and ensures up-to-date content - all while potentially saving costs in the longterm. According to a report from the Digital Textbook Collaborative, which was convened by the FCC and the US Department of Education, the cost of implementing the shift to digital varies from $250 to $1,000 per student per year, but the cost savings from increased teacher attendance, reduced paper costs, online assessments and other factors are estimated to be $600 per student per year. However, some say estimates on cost savings assume tablet prices that are less than actual costs and, without funding support, the upfront costs are difficult for many school districts to manage."

"Social media has swallowed the news - threatening the funding of public-interest reporting and ushering in an era when everyone has their own facts. But the consequences go far beyond journalism"

"Elbakyan's civil disobedience has forced the issue on behalf of a society that continues to allow the knowledge it creates to be locked away from the public that pays for it. And it has the potential to disrupt academic publishing forever."

The bills would create an online library of digital textbooks for the 50 most widely-taken lower division courses at the University of California, California State University and the state's community colleges. The project would get under way when state or private funding becomes available. The digital texts would be "open-source," which means they are not copyrighted the same way traditional texts are, making them much less expensive. The texts are primarily available online; students can typically buy a print-out for around $20, about one-tenth the cost of many traditional textbooks.

Los Angeles school officials are acknowledging a new looming cost in a $1-billion effort to provide iPads to every student: keyboards. Officials so far have not budgeted that expense, but they said the wireless keyboards are recommended for students when they take new state standardized tests. If keyboards were to be provided for all 650,000 students, the cost could be more than $38 million at current retail prices. It's not clear if the district plans to provide keyboards for all, and officials were not prepared to estimate the cost during a meeting last week of a Board of Education committee that is tracking the iPad initiative.

Today, a survey released by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund shows that 65% of student consumers have opted out of buying a college textbook due to its high price, and of those students, 94% they suffer academically.

The Republican governor proposed setting aside $300 million from the Tennessee Education Lottery to fund an endowment that would cover all tuition and fees to two-year institutions for all graduating high school seniors. The plan also calls for reducing Hope scholarships for incoming students at four-year universities by $1,000 for the first two years.