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Custom Course Materials for Higher Education

Custom Course Materials for Higher Education

Connexions - Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities How Online Education Is Changing the Way We Learn [INFOGRAPHIC] Over the past decade or so, the Internet has become a huge source of information and education, especially for those who might be short on time, money or other resources. And it's not just crowdsourced data collections like Wikipedia or single-topic blogs that encourage individual learning; huge corporations and nonprofits are making online education and virtual classrooms a very formal affair these days. From the first online classes (which were conducted by the University of Phoenix in 1989) to the present day, when online education is a $34 billion industry, more and more students are finding new life and career education opportunities online. Check out this infographic from OnlineEducation.net about how the world of online learning has changed and grown over the years. Click image to see larger version. [source: Online Education] Top image based on a photograph from iStockphoto user flyingdouglas.

Push Pop Press — About Us Last year Push Pop Press set off to re-imagine the book. We created a new way of publishing and exploring text, images, audio, video and interactive graphics, then teamed up with Melcher Media and Al Gore to create a new kind of book. The result is Al Gore's Our Choice, which was released earlier this year. The response has been incredible. Tech columnist David Pogue of The New York Times summed it up by saying: “this is one of the most elegant, fluid, impressive apps you've ever seen.

OER: The Myth of Commercial Textbook Reliability | College Open Textbooks Blog An “OER” is an open education resource and the most common example is an open textbook. An open textbook is a book, most often electronic, that is licensed in a way that allows re-use, repurposing, editing, and republishing. One of the main advantages in an open textbook, apart from the fact that they are free, is that open textbooks can be edited by the instructor. Some “open” textbooks managed by commercial publishers may not be editable at the sentence level. One of the criticisms leveled at open textbooks is that the quality somehow suffers because they do not have the “imprimatur” of the commercial publishers. According to the Educause article “7 Things You Should Know About Open Textbooks,” ”The traditional publishing model features robust editorial..mechanisms designed to ensure the quality…of printed textbooks.” I will let these examples suffice for now. How did we get here? Lets do our job as educators and not rely on commercial businesses to teach our students.

Inkling Raises $17M for Digital Textbooks - Liz Gannes - Media Inkling, the San Francisco-based maker of interactive iPad textbooks (see D9 demo video here), has raised $17 million in Series B funding led by Tenaya Capital and including Jafco Ventures, Pearson Education and Sequoia Capital. Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis, citing IBISWorld data, noted in a recent interview that the U.S. textbook market was worth $16 billion in 2010 — versus $15 billion for “trade books” (fiction, literary non-fiction, everything else). That’s depicted in the chart below. Inkling has 60 employees and hundreds of offshore workers who help format books, which MacInnis said he expects to increase to thousands next year. Today, Inkling’s best sellers are medical textbooks. MacInnis said Inkling will also soon expand beyond textbooks, though he’s keeping the details under wraps for now. Tagged with: D9, funding, IBISWorld, Inkling, iPad, JAFCO Ventures, Matt MacInnis, Pearson Education, Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital, textbooks

Edward L. Glaeser: E-Ties That Bind Edward L. Glaeser is an economics professor at Harvard and the author of “Triumph of the City.” Will electronic connections make cities obsolete? In the giddy early days of e-mail and the Internet, some prophets proclaimed that humans would no longer bother with the inconveniences of density and would instead retreat, in Alvin Toffler’s phrase, to “electronic cottages.” Fifteen years ago, I wrote a paper with Jess Gaspar suggesting that cyberspace connectivity could make face-to-face interactions, and the cities that enable them, more valuable than ever. In the language of economics, the core question is whether face-to-face interactions and electronic connections are substitutes or complements. Little cleverness is necessary to think that using e-mail is a substitute for meeting in person, and certainly, electronics does substitute for some live connections. My older paper with Mr. A similar cluster exists in Bangalore.

CAMEX Puts the Emphasis on Digital Change was the theme of this year’s 88th annual National Association of College Stores meeting and Campus Market Expo at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, which ended Tuesday. “If we don’t change, we will not be viable. It needs to be significant change in a significant way,” said Donald “Buz” Moser, executive director of business services for Wake Forest University Stores in Winston-Salem, N.C., at a symposium for campus administrators. Nowhere is change more evident than the NACS’s digital initiative. At a digital update held at the show, Mark Nelson, CIO of NACS and v-p of NACS Media Solutions, discussed the inroads digital has made on the college market. “Our business is not selling books,” said Nelson. Last April NACS developed a pilot program with 20 campus stores and Flat World Knowledge, publisher of commercial open source textbooks. While e-books continue to garner attention, the market to rent physical textbooks online continues to heat up.

Historical and Cultural Contexts . Newspaper Articles After a long and persistent fight advocates of woman suffrage won a victory in the Senate today when that body, by a vote of 56 to 25, adopted the Susan Anthony amendment to the Constitution. The suffrage supporters had two more than the necessary two-thirds vote of Senators present. Had all the Senators known to be in favor of suffrage been present the amendment would have had 66 votes, or two more than a two-thirds vote of the entire Senate. Credit: Library of Congress An illustration of the Women's Suffrage Procession on March 3, early 20th century. The amendment, having already been passed by the House, where the vote was 304 to 89, now goes to the States for ratification, where it will be passed upon in the form in which it has been adopted by Congress, as follows: "Article-, Section 1. - The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Changes Defeated. Prospects of Ratification

Digital Reading App, Online Reading with Friends, Ebook Reader App, iPad Ebook Reader

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