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Coursera, Chegg, and the Education Enclosure Movement. The online learning startup Coursera and a handful of textbook publishers announced today that they’re teaming up to make certain digital course materials available to students enrolled in Coursera’s classes.

Coursera, Chegg, and the Education Enclosure Movement

Cengage Learning, Macmillan Higher Education, Oxford University Press, SAGE, and Wiley will offer versions of their textbooks via an e-reader provided by Chegg. For certain courses, students will be able to access all or parts of textbooks for free. The materials are restricted by DRM: students will not be able to copy-paste or print, and access to the textbooks will be revoked when the course ends. As the press release reads, of course, “students will also be able to purchase full versions of e-textbooks provided by publishers for continued personal learning.” The partnership aims to encourage professors to assign more reading in their Coursera courses. But I think it signals other things too about the rapidly changing MOOC landscape… Super-professors. But not Coursera. The Battle for "Open" Part 8 of my Top 10 Ed-Tech Trends of 2013 series As with the trend of “data,” “open” is something I’ve touched upon in each of my annual year-end reviews (in 2011 and 2012.

The Battle for "Open"

Again, I recommend reading those posts to gain a sense of past, present, and future). In some ways the two –“data” and “open” – represent opposite directions in ed-tech: the former towards a consolidation of power; the latter towards its distribution. The former towards an extraction of value from the learning community, from the public; the latter towards the cultivation of a commons. But that’s a terrible over-simplication, in part because both “open” and “data” have become so deeply intertwined in what Evgeny Morozov in To Save Everything Click Here calls “technological solutionism” – this notion that technology can provide us with simple answers (in this case, with more data or more openness) to complicated questions we can’t fully articulate or haven’t fully explored. What is “Open”? Morozov writes, Hack Education. Curriki. Free.  Open-source.  Peer-reviewed. High-quality textbooks for your college course. - OpenStax College.

Free.

Free.  Open-source.  Peer-reviewed. High-quality textbooks for your college course. - OpenStax College

Open-source. Peer-reviewed. High-quality textbooks for your college course. An Easy Choice for Faculty Built to standards that faculty expect. Learn More >> The Right Price for Students The perfect price for a student budget: free. Learn More >> College Open Textbooks - College Open Textbooks. II - Home. Featured Courses. Here’s a quick peek at a couple courses available through the Open Course Library.

Featured Courses

Math 107 – Math in Society The purpose of this course is to expose you to the wider world of mathematical thinking. There are two reasons for this. First, for you to understand the power of quantitative thinking and the power of numbers in solving and dealing with real world scenarios. Secondly, for you to understand that there is more to mathematics than expressions and equations. The core course is a complete, ready to run, fully online course, featuring 9 topics: Problem solving, voting theory, graph theory, growth models, consumer finance, collecting data, describing data, probability, and historical counting.

Each topic features: more details….. PHIL 120 – Symbolic Logic Course Overview: An introduction to symbolic logic with an emphasis on formal logical languages and natural deduction systems of logical proof. More details….. OER Commons.

Diigo - OKMOOC

OK-MOOC: Student Activity - Week 1 - Seek, Sense, Share. Vandana Shiva: Indigenous Knowledge. DIA_GarciaPenalvoGarcia deFiguerolaMerloJA_Openknowledge.pdf. Help. European Schoolnet. OpenStax CNX - Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities. Readings. Gary Kovacs: Tracking our online trackers. Internet History part 2: Vint Cerf & Bob Kahn Invent Code of Internet (TCP explained) Animation Explaining Open Source Culture for [open source] Internet History part 1: The First Time Two Computers Were Ever Connected.