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"Knewton's pivot in 2018 toward tools that combine adaptive-learning technology with open educational resources was a big part of the attraction for Wiley. With its Alta digital-courseware platform, Knewton is primarily an OER company now, Wiley's president and chief executive, Brian Napack, told The Chronicle. The product costs students about $40 per course. Wiley wants to "double down" on low-cost options, Napack said. "We're doing this because we think the future needs to look different than the past.""

"What Anbar has in mind is something he calls "active OER." That's taking the standard digital textbook and expanding it with the addition of digital resources, including simulations that are both interactive and adaptive. "The learner doesn't just move something around in the simulation but actually gets prompting feedback that guides them to success," he explained. That's where Smart Sparrow comes in: The company produces aero, a learning platform that allows the instructor to pull together lessons from a set of templates that can include text, tests, assessments, virtual labs and field trips, and other digital components. For the purposes of the consortium, those elements would be pulled from OER materials."

"Among the software slated to be released under an open-source license is the university's pioneering adaptive-learning project, the Open Learning Initiative, as well as a learning analytics platform LearnSphere. Officials estimate that developing the software has cost more than $100 million in foundation grants and university dollars. The goal of the software giveaway is to jump-start "learning engineering," the practice of applying findings from learning science to college classrooms."

""We welcome Acrobatiq's team to the VitalSource family," said Pep Carrera, President of VitalSource®. "VitalSource already does more than just deliver learning materials.  We empower students and faculty with the resources necessary to promote greater success. By combining Acrobatiq's cognitive and data science-based platform with VitalSource's valued relationships with publishers and institutions, we have an opportunity to bring high impact learning to the market at an unprecedented scale."  "

"This squishiness in the OPM market is a sign that more and more schools are serious enough about learning to be systematically better at supporting student success that they are increasingly willing to pay for help. And that change in prioritization is potentially good for everyone."

"Knewton today announced the launch of Alta, the company's fully integrated adaptive learning courseware for higher education. Available at $44 per course for two years of access, Alta delivers an affordable and impactful teaching and learning experience that combines Knewton's adaptive learning technology with high-quality openly available content."

"it appears that the rise of free or low-cost online learning and professional education content is reducing the demand for some continuing-education courses offered by universities. In some cases, it may be reducing demand for executive education offerings, and even for degree programs like the traditional MBA. While individual workers remain interested in credentials-which are portable from job-to-job-companies often prefer to invest in targeted learning opportunities that relate directly to their business needs and has a clear business return on investment. "My people already have degrees, they need something more specific," says Bradley. "Academic credit is not always the selling point that universities think it is.""

"Ideo identified six basic vectors that it says are instrumental to an innovative, adaptive company: Purpose, experimentation, collaboration, empowerment, looking out (i.e. staying informed about what's happening in the industry), and refinement (the ability to successfully execute new ideas)."

"The effective implementation and use of adaptive learning systems requires a broad, more inclusive conversation among institutions, vendors, and other stakeholders to realize the benefits of next-generation personalized learning."

"OCW Educator helps teachers search the vast library of OCW resources to find instructional approaches and teaching materials. Explore This Course at MIT pages to discover how MIT instructors teach their courses, and freely select and adapt their explanations, examples, and simulations to help concepts come to life in your own classroom."

"the same student being tracked and evaluated while using an adaptive courseware product has a digital footprint and legacy that extends well beyond the parameters of a singularly focused electronic learning environment."

"This book is a practical guide to adapting or creating open textbooks using the PressBooks platform. It is continually evolving as new information, practices and processes are developed. The primary audience for this book are faculty and post-secondary instructors in Saskatchewan, Canada who are developing, adapting or adopting open textbooks at the University of Saskatchewan. However, there may be content within this book that is useful to others working on similar Open Educational Resource initiatives."

"One of the obstacles to bringing "adaptive learning" to college classrooms is that professors, administrators, and even those who make adaptive-learning systems don't always agree on what that buzzword means."

"With the advent of the Internet and online learning, however, I eventually realized the need to expand my vision of learning communities beyond the class cohort. After all, if learning is essentially a phenomenon of network activity (think complex adaptive system), the ability to expand each learner's network capacity by introducing additional communities increases the her or his learning potential as well as the possibility for feedback into the network."

"They perceived they had overcome most obstacles, but that others at their institutions had not.   They did not believe that others were teaching courses that were on par with face-to-face classes in terms of quality. This is because of findings 2 and 3. The second finding was that the overwhelming majority did not feel support from their institutions when transitioning to online modalities, rather they indicated that experiential learning in the form of mentorship, learning by doing, and dialog with peers were most critical when overcoming the challenges. The third finding was that the majority of participants indicated the time required for preparation and intrusion of time on an ongoing basis during the course of an online class were significantly greater than time requirements of a face-to-face course."

"Stephanie Richter introduced memes to her colleagues at Northern Illinois University with a Prezi, identifying a meme as a snippet of culture, a thought, behavior, or artifact it spreads via transmission and adaptation, sharing and imitation, and is something everyone has seen or recognizes."

For many companies such a project is their first small step in providing learning content for mobile (mLearning). Once again my recommendation is to resist this approach if you can. Pushing content that was designed for a desktop or laptop onto a small screen is not the best way to go about learning design.

"Faculty and students at UC Davis, meanwhile, are developing what they call "hyperlibraries" of faculty writings, homework questions, research and other content available online that are then vetted, and, like a Wikipedia page, constantly expanded and adapted to meet specific needs. The goal is to produce e-textbooks in the chemistry, biology, statistics, math, physics and geology fields - dubbed ChemiWiki, BioWiki, MathWiki, etc. - that eventually will supplant traditional texts, which can cost up to $300 per copy, said UC Davis chemistry professor Delmar Larsen. A pilot study of the ChemWiki last spring found that students in a general chemistry class who used the online materials would have spent about $125,000 had they bought new textbooks, Larsen said."

"People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning "modules" rather than lock into 12-week university courses? That question is a major theme of a 213-page report released on Monday by a committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploring how the 153-year-old engineering powerhouse should innovate to adapt to new technologies and new student expectations."

Why invest lots of time, effort and energy creating new course materials from scratch when quality, freely-available resources may already exist? Why not adapt and use these resources, known as Open Educational Resources (OER)?