Students Ready for More Tech in the Classroom

The latest CDW-G student survey on education technology found just 23% of those polled were satisfied with the way instructors use class time. Those who were satisfied tended to listen to fewer lectures and use technology more.

“I do learn more with a mixed style, where the class is opened up to group discussion,” said Hannah Davis, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was part of a student panel during the Learn Now, Lecture Later: The New College Experience session at the Campus Technology 2012 conference in Boston.

The report surveyed 1,015 students, faculty, and IT staff at the high school and college level last May and June. Technology is employed more in college classrooms than high school, with 74% of college students using digital content, 55% making use of smartphones, and 53% taking advantage of recorded lectures.

“I like having the lecture online, so I can pause it and rewind,” said panelist Mario Solorzano, a student at Arizona State University. He told of an English professor at ASU who uses Skype to connect with students after office hours and of a grad student who created a Facebook study group.

In addition to greater opportunities to use technology in the classroom, students say they would like to see digital formats become standardized and the price of e-books come down.

“I find e-books priced much the same as textbooks and can’t bring myself to buy it for the same price as a hardcover, even though I would find them beneficial,” said Tyler Hughes, a student at the University of Michigan.

There are plenty of other challenges for IT and faculty to work out. Andy Lausch, vice president of higher education at CDW-G and moderator of the student-panel session, pointed to budget constraints, class size, and time for professional development as the biggest obstacles. Another hurdle could be faculty mindset, since the survey also found that 88% of respondents view moving away from traditional lectures as a challenge.

“Students say classroom time is moving in the right direction, but they want a greater mix of learning models, with more hands-on assignments and more virtual learning,” said Lausch. 

Aiming K-12 Books at Parental Rental

Instead of trying to persuade K-12 schools or district boards to adopt digital textbooks on a widespread scale, Kno is embarking on a different strategy: marketing e-textbooks to parents one at a time.

The software company just signed up to license textbook content from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to create digital versions of its K-12 books, which Kno will rent to Mom and Dad at $9.99 per year per title, or as Kno CEO Osman Rashid put it, “for the price of a couple of Happy Meals.”

HMH has an estimated 50% of the K-12 textbook market, which means there’s an awful lot of kids out there with at least one HMH title in their backpacks. As Publishers Weekly explained, the digital texts will reproduce the pages of the printed texts, so Junior doesn’t get confused in doing homework. But the e-books will also sport helpful extras, such as 3-D animated demonstrations, flash cards, highlighting, and a digital journal for note-taking.

TechCrunch pointed out the pricing doesn’t exactly add up to a pot of gold for Kno, although for the publisher it’s bonus money on top of the print sales. However, Rashid is banking on the low price to attract more parents to try out the digital books at home. Once they do, he hopes they’ll push for adoption at their children’s schools.

If more youngsters get accustomed to digital books while still in K-12, in a few years that could ratchet up demand for the college-level digital books that Kno already provides through partnerships with higher-education publishers.

In Defense of Publishers and Digital

Brian Kibby, president of McGraw-Hill Education, threw down the gauntlet in a recent essay for Inside Higher Education, asserting that there needs to be a complete shift to digital in higher education, and it needs to be done within the next 36 months. He claims lagging grades and student graduation rates, along with graduates not leaving schools with the skills employers need, as the reasons the digital shift is so important.

The problem with this challenge is those paying for the course materials aren’t buying it, according to Daniel Luzer, web editor of the Washington Monthly.

“That’s because students don’t actually like the digital model,” Luzer wrote. “While electronic might work well enough for some forms of reading: novels (particularly the trash sort where you don’t want people to see what you’re reading on the subway or whatever) and magazine articles, it’s not actually all that good for studying, where underlining and marking up the text is part of what enables people to learn. It’s just hard to study using anything other than print.”

He then suggests the possibility of an ulterior motive to Kibby’s challenge.

“What students really want are used or rental textbooks,” Luzer said. “Textbook rentals are very popular on college campuses. But then, McGraw-Hill doesn’t make any money off textbook rentals or used books.”

Making publishers out to be the bad guys may be good reading on a blog, but Luzer seems to fail to understand where digital course materials and education are headed, which is part of Kibby's point. Digital course materials of the future will be not be the “PDF-equivalent” that they are today, and it will not be about “reading” text like we may have in the pre- and early-digital dark ages.

While Kibby’s forecast may be aggressively optimistic, the future of course materials will be more digital, and more value-adding in terms of contributing to student success. What will replace textbooks are products that are interactive, incorporate assessments, and which are tied to improving learning outcomes. Most major publishers, like McGraw, are making substantive investments in higher education gaming solutions, assessment of content mastery, re-envisioned LMS and learning environments, adaptive learning materials, and a range of other digital products that we would hardly recognize as “textbooks.”

Regarding the ulterior motive ascribed to Kibby’s challenge, publishers like McGraw are publicly traded commercial enterprises, and thus have a distinct incentive to maximize financial returns. If current business practices (e.g., used and rental) do not allow them to generate revenue off of products they originally created, then we should expect they will explore and promote products and business models that do.

What students want is value at a reasonable price. That does not necessarily mean “used or rental” textbooks. They are just the perceived best option at the current time.

Our mission should be to improve educational affordability and student success. We should learn to stop bashing the publishers like an autoimmune response to change.

Do I like every publisher business practice?  No.  Are course material prices too high (generally speaking)?  Yes.  Are arguments like this productive or lead to better solutions?  Not likely.

We would be much better served by finding ways to be part of the new technologies and delivery models, and helping find ways to improve them, rather than giving the long-term suppliers and partners for our core product reasons to work against and around us. Let us take some accountability and help create options that address both affordability and student success, recognizing that many of these options will be substantively digital in the possibly not-to-distant future.

Could Watermark Provide DRM Solution?

Publishers can’t be blamed for trying to safeguard their assets with digital rights management protection on their e-titles, particularly against large-scale file sharing.

The problem is DRM does not really deter anyone determined to share files, which led Dana Robinson, a adjunct professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law and partner with Techlaw LLP, to propose a solution in an article for Digital Book World. His solution would be to create e-books with a watermark place throughout the book.

The e-book’s buyer would have to provide personal information for the watermark by agreeing to terms and conditions that would prohibit the resale or distribution of the title.

“The point of making a watermark that shows the user’s personal information is to create a disincentive for the user to pass the book along to unknown third parties, deputizing the user to act as a gatekeeper, protecting the book from wrongful distribution,” Robinson wrote, adding that removing the watermark could then be a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Robinson points out that his watermark solution would not prevent people from sharing their book with family or close friends, but that they’ve always done that with printed books. His watermark is aimed at individuals trying to gain financially from someone else’s work.

“What e-book publishers need is a way to distribute e-books with as little hassle as possible, while ensuring that the publisher can sue pirates and stop e-book sales, rental, and large-scale sharing,” he said.

Change is coming to E-Book Market

The Department of Justice recently filed a motion asking that its settlement with Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster in its e-book pricing lawsuit be approved in federal court. No surprise there.

If accepted, sometime around the middle of September, retailers will be able to set their own prices for e-books, at least from the three publishers in the settlement.  The settlement allows the agency-pricing model that came under DOJ scrutiny to remain, but the provisions of the settlement make anything resembling the current agency model highly unlikely.

While the settlement allows retailers to set the sales prices, publishers can prohibit discounts on their books. That provision comes into play when the total sales of a year exceed the margin the retailer has earned, according to an analysis of the agreement in The Shatzkin Files.

However, the article also points out how easily that discount prohibition may be sidestepped. For instance, a retailer such as Amazon may choose to cut e-book prices way below its costs during a specific time frame, such as the upcoming holiday season, figuring to make up the margin over the next nine months. In the meantime, other publishers who may still be clinging to the agency-pricing model may have to lower its prices just to stay competitive.

Which is exactly what many in the bookselling industry feared all along.

Cengage Places Bid to Buy McGraw-Hill Education

Last month, Standard & Poor’s reported that Cengage Learning’s cash flow was “less than adequate” to cover its needs over the next 12 to 18 months. Last week, reports surfaced that Cengage made a bid to purchase McGraw-Hill Education (MHE). So what gives?

As it turns out, buying MHE could be a way for Cengage to increase its revenue, according to the report. The S&P report about Cengage’s cash flow was based on an assumption that future refinancing costs would be too high, with the Reuters article adding that “may be driving Cengage and its private equity owners to consider acquisitions that would boost its cash flow.”

“It wouldn’t be appropriate for us to comment on what McGraw-Hill might or might not do with respect to a sale or spin-off of its education business,” said Cengage CEO Ron Dunn in the Reuters story. “With regards to Cengage Learning, we continue to generate strong cash flows from operations and we are very confident that we can service our debt while continuing to fund our business at appropriate levels as we lead the migration to digital solutions in all our markets.”

Cengage isn’t alone in its interest in MHE. Reuters reports that Bain Capital, Thomas H. Lee Partners, and Apollo Global Management have also placed bids for the firm that could be valued at around $3 billion, according to The Bookseller. Reuters also reports Cengage is looking to make a bid for EmbanetCompass, an online education services company.

McGraw-Hill decided last September to split into two publicly traded companies by the end of 2012 after calls from minority shareholders to restructure the business. MHE earned $2.3 billion in revenues and had an operating income of $260 million last year. Digital-related solutions accounted for more than 20% of its 2011 revenue

As in any business venture, there are risks for Cengage, particularly if its cash flow declines. Consolidating that much debt into one company could also be a concern for the industry, but the potential for reduced store-channel leverage and more direct-to-customer and institutional sales models are also long-term concerns stemming from more consolidated content.

Or the bid could provide Cengage with some breathing room.

New Study Shows Readers' Format Preferences Vary

The percentage of consumers are buying titles in digital formats has fallen, but more people are also saying they have no preference when it comes to the format of a book, according to the latest Book Industry Study Group e-book reading survey.

Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading reports the portion of consumers who “exclusively or mostly” buy e-books fell from nearly 70% in August 2011 to 60% just nine months later. At the same time, the percentage of respondents who either had no preference between e-book or print formats, or who bought some of both, went up from 25% to 34%, signaling that consumers have become more comfortable with a variety of reading formats.

The study found that ownership of the Amazon Kindle Fire has increased from 7% to 20% of respondents from December 2011 to June 2011, and that the use of multifunctional tables as a primary reading device is growing at about the same pace that the preference for dedicated e-readers has dropped. Preference for the Kindle as a primary reading device fell from 48% in August 2011 to 35% in May 2012, while black-and-white and color versions of the Nook e-reader slipped from 17% to 13% over the same period.

The Apple iPad remained steady in the ownership survey at 17% from August 2011 to May 2012, but now trails the Kindle Fire in the ownership category. The number of respondents who use the iPad as an e-reader also dipped from 10% to 9%.

While the iPad may have moved into second place in the BISG consumer survey, Student Monitor found that 66% of respondents to its survey of 1,200 college students say that the iPad was the “in” device on campus, even though fewer than 12% actually own one. At the same time, the Student Monitor research showed that 88% of students own a laptop computer, 19% have desktops, and just 10% say they own a tablet.

The research also found students’ preference in course material formats may be shifting. Printed textbooks continue to dominate sales, but students saying they “prefer traditional textbooks” has declined from 50% two years ago to 39% in the most recent Student Monitor report.

Open-Access Deal a First for Canada Campuses

Here and there across the U.S., colleges and universities are trying out open-access course materials, often cautiously as part of structured pilots. Now Canadian schools are starting to join them. Recently the University of Windsor in Ontario became the first to sign a licensing agreement for open digital materials for a fall course in management information systems.

In its press announcement of the deal, the school touted the cost savings to students. The local paper, the Windsor Star, also beat the same drum, starting off its report, “There’s a lot to hate about traditional textbooks…”

Students will pay $20 for e-books and study aids that can be downloaded to a computer, laptop, smartphone, e-reader, or tablet. The materials are being provided through Flat World Knowledge. About 200 students are expected to take part in this initial pilot.

If that goes well, the university plans to add more courses for the second term and then expand depending on how quickly faculty are willing to adopt Flat World titles. There may be somewhat more pressure on them to do so than at other institutions, given that Windsor’s tagline is “Thinking forward.”

The University of Windsor Bookstore already sells e-books and furnishes online assistance with e-reader apps as part of an array of textbook services that includes rentals, used books, and an RSS feed to provide textbook updates. The store is also one of a handful of campus stores offering print-on-demand through an in-store Espresso book-printing machine.

University of Minnesota Creates E-Book in 10 Weeks

The University of Minnesota launched its online open-text catalog at the end of April in an effort to give students access to textbooks online for free, or printed for a small fee. Now, university faculty and staff have created a 317-page e-book in 10 weeks.

Cultivating Change in the Academy: 50+ Stories from the Digital Frontlines at the University of Minnesota in 2012 is a compilation of contributions from 57 faculty members, 51 staffers, 17 graduate students, and five undergrads, all of whom volunteered their work so there would be no cost to producing the title, according to Ann Hill Duin, professor of writing studies at the Twin Cities campus.

The book was released July 9 to the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, which serves the online open-access repository. The conservancy also provided a permanent web address for the book.

“We really want to maintain access just like we do with our print,” said Lisa Johnston, research services librarian at the Twin Cities campus and co-director of the conservancy. She contributed to a chapter on the conservancy’s role in curating digital research. “We are a service that makes information available to the public via the web.”

The book focuses on “ideas for transforming teaching methods, solutions to specific classroom problems, examples of campus leaders providing direction and support for these efforts, and ways the university is spreading innovation off campus,” according to a report in Inside Higher Education.

“The e-book is far greater than the sum of the parts,” said Duin. “It’s connecting people with the innovative, imaginative, creative, collaborative dynamic work under way.”

The book is already attracting a following. Abram Anders, assistant professor of business communications at UM-Duluth’s Labovitz School of Business and Economics, reports more than 4,000 views so far of the chapter he wrote about his work with Google Apps script.

“I can see that we’re getting some people coming to our site from the press release that the school put out, some people coming from e-mail links, some people coming from Facebook,” he said, adding that people are also finding the site through Twitter posts.

New Study Shows Potential of Online Learning

A new report found that college students using an interactive learning online (ILO) system with one hour of classroom instruction each week scored the same in standardized tests as students taking the same course through traditional classroom methods. Results from the study may lessen concern about students’ learning results when taking online courses.

“This method appears to have potential,” says Matthew M. Chingos, a senior research consultant for Ithaka S+R.  “I view this research as a proof of concept that at least one instance of a high-quality online course can produce equivalent outcomes, and hopefully future versions that are higher quality will do even better.”

In fact, students in the hybrid course scored slightly higher and devoted 25% less time to coursework, according to the report Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials. However, students also reported enjoying the hybrid course less than students taking the traditional class.

Chingos says he believes the ILO course lacked features students expected from an online course, which led to the lower score. He also speculated that better features would produce better results.

“If you could imagine a future version of a course like this, taking advantage of more addictive, interactive, exciting features, getting students even more involved in it, the hope is that in the long run, this won’t just produce the same outcomes in less time for less money, but will actually improve the quality of the educational experience,” he says.

Mobile Device Management Costs on the Rise

A new study found that while business usage of mobile devices continues to rise, so do the annual IT labor costs of keeping them running. The study by Osterman Research was not aimed at higher education, but focused on mobile device management (MDM) at 117 companies with 7,000 employees using 5,000 or more smartphones. It found that IT labor costs per user rose from $229 in 2011 to $294 this year, and are projected to hit $339 next year.

Forty percent of respondents are using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) as its MDM platform, but could be looking for alternatives after Research in Motion, the firm that created the BlackBerry device and BES, was ordered to pay millions for violating an MDM patent. Switching to a new MDM means new costs for platform, hardware, and training of IT personnel, along with the possibility of new people to manage and monitor it, according to Scott Gode, vice president of product management and marketing at Azaleos, the communications provider that sponsored the study.

MDM costs are also expected to rise because of the increased functionality of new mobile systems and the IT policies that need to be developed to manage the device. Other challenges that add cost to MDM, according to the survey, are setup and deployment of the devices, training users, troubleshooting, and security.

Finally, the survey found that firms prefer cloud-based MDM solutions because they are easy to administer and maintain (69%) and costs are more predictable or even reduced (39%).

“The new MDM vendors have created their products in such a way that there is no feature dropoff if you choose cloud versus on-premise,” Gode said.

Publishers' Maneuvers Signal Need for Change

It’s no secret many colleges and universities are struggling to meet their budgets due to funding cuts and stagnant endowments. Many students, too, are having trouble covering tuition. But academic publishers are feeling the pinch as well, even as schools gear up for the fall term—the course-materials equivalent of the holiday shopping season.

Recent financial moves by two of the biggest college textbook publishers reveal signs of stress, which could redefine relationships with campus bookstores.

Last September, McGraw-Hill said it would spin off its educational publishing from its more profitable financial data publishing, creating two companies. However, the Wall Street Journal reported July 13 that a private equity firm is sniffing around the educational unit and may put in a bid to buy it.

In a separate report by Bloomberg News, Cengage Learning, grappling with debt from its own acquisition five years ago, may be considering an initial public offering to bring in cash.

“The academic publishers are under threat, and campus stores should not assume that they are immune or unaffected by that or similar factors. We should not look at challenging times among the publishers as a good thing,” says Mark Nelson, NACS chief information officer and vice president of NACS Media Solutions.

For independent and institutional campus stores, the situation doesn’t bode well. These stores are already a difficult (read: costly) channel for textbook publishers because each store must be dealt with on an individual basis. Systems vary from store to store, and some stores, astonishingly in this era, still don’t have full inventory management or e-commerce capabilities. Some tussle mightily with publishers who are trying to move into digital course materials.

“The more stores fight against publishers, the more publishers will be pushed to look at alternative channels they can potentially trust, such as direct-to-student,” Nelson says. “If they are working around campus stores as a channel, did anyone ever give thought to the possibility that it is because stores aren’t adding value to them as a channel as they once did?”

Yet the key to survival for both academic publishers and campus stores may lie in stronger partnerships. “The publishers need campus stores, and we need them if we are going to make it through the digital transition ahead,” Nelson says.

“Within NACS, we are developing or considering several mechanisms to improve publisher relations and industry relevance,” Nelson says. “We’re looking at communications that help publishers understand what we’re doing, both as an association and an industry. We’re looking to create a publisher advisory board to provide us with input into how to develop better programs and services, and create a stronger communication channel between stores and publishers.

“Logistically, this may be executed later this year through The Hub, the new online collaboration and knowledge management environment NACS is preparing to unveil at CAMEX 2013,” he adds. “NACS alone cannot solve these problems, however, if stores and publishers are unwilling to change their perspectives. If we fail to do so, we may all fail to transition.”

Is Amazon Working on Same-Day Delivery?

Bricks-and-mortar retailers have battled long and hard over the sales-tax advantage that online vendors have, particularly Amazon. Customers are supposed to pay sales tax on all purchased items, but few actually do, providing a significant price advantage for online services.

Merchants say if Amazon had to pay local sales taxes like they do, consumers would see online prices more on par with their own physical-store prices. Amazon appears to now agree as it is dropping its tooth-and-nail fight against every sales tax initiative in favor of negotiating agreements to build warehouses in large metropolitan areas.

It’s a change in strategy that could help Amazon accomplish what some believe is its new goal: providing same-day delivery for many of the products it sells. That may be a necessary change considering a Citigroup survey found 52% of Amazon shoppers would be less likely to buy goods on the site if they had to pay sales tax.

Whatever the reason, Amazon is putting a lot of money behind the project. The company will reportedly spend more that $1.2 billion on distribution facilities in California, Indiana, New Jersey, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, with $500 million for as many as 10 locations in California alone. That should be enough centers to provide next-day service for nearly all of the continental United States.

Along with new facilities, Amazon has been working on ways to improve shipping times at the facilities it already has. It acquired Kiva Systems, which developed a robotic warehouse system, and set up automated lockers in drugstores and convenience stores in Seattle, New York, and the United Kingdom. It also works with local couriers capable of same-day delivery when the product is available that quickly.

“Amazon is investing billions to make next-day delivery standard, and same-day delivery an option for a lot of customers,” technology writer Farhad Manjoo said in this Slate article. “If it can pull that off, the company will permanently alter who we shop. To put it more bluntly: Physical retailers will be hosed.”

Mixed Signals from Faculty on Online Ed

New research shows a majority of faculty members continue to fear the growth of online education, but that could change as more instructors begin to use technology. Conflicted: Faculty and Online Education, 2012, reports that while nearly 70% of instructors who only taught in classrooms were afraid of the online push, 59% of instructors who taught an online course were more excited about the trend.

The study conducted by Inside Higher Ed and the Babson Survey Research Group, surveyed 4,546 faculty members and 591 academic technology administrators. Respondents were questioned about their perceptions of online quality, institutional support and training, and compensation.

The report found diverging viewpoints on online education between faculty and administrators. Nearly 60% of all faculty respondents either agreed with or were neutral to questions about whether their institutions were “pushing too much online.” At the same time, 79% of administrators disagreed with the notion.

Faculty gave failing grades to online learning outcomes, with 66% saying they were lower than tradition classroom work. While 39% of teachers who had taught online agreed with the substandard learning outcomes, nearly half said online and traditional courses produced similar results and 66% of online instructors felt online teaching was capable of matching classroom instruction.

“Learning how to teach online probably would be one of the best steps a professor could take to assure viability in the 21st century,” wrote John Thelin in a follow-up essay on the report that appeared in Inside Higher Ed. “The most dysfunctional response by a professor today would be to dismiss or ignore both the technology and the social consequence online learning has.”

Thelin, a professor at the University of Kentucky who describes himself as “not so much low-tech as slow-tech,” wrote about his efforts to take one of his graduate classes online. While the course preparation phase was thoughtful and innovative, getting official approval included delay and “unreasonable obstacles.” At the same time, he concluded that online courses do not necessarily mean new revenue for the school or savings for students.

“All the variables of effectiveness, efficiency, cost, and price are subject to the same complexities, adjustments, and vacillations of any higher education program offering,” Thelin wrote.

The Downside to E-Textbooks

There’s been plenty of research showing students are just not into electronic textbooks hype. In fact, the OnCampus Research report Student Watch 2012: Student Attitudes and Perceptions found that just 17% of student respondents even owned an e-reader and 62% of these bought the gadget just for leisure reading.

So why aren’t college students clamoring for e-textbooks? After all, they should be cheaper to purchase, plus there’s all those nifty tools, such as highlighting and interactive footnotes, geared to attract a tech-savvy generation.

The top reason for student reluctance is they’re not often finding the required book in their preferred digital format, according to the Online University staff’s look at reasons why college students aren’t buying e-textbooks. Even if students find the correct digital text, they soon discover it probably only saved them about a dollar after factoring in the cost of the e-reader, “publisher pricing decisions,” and the fact they can’t sell the title back.

Digital formats also complicate the process for students because they vary from one device to another. Add in the fact that some e-text will eat up large portions of storage space in each device, as well as that some e-text can look pretty primitive next to online learning sources, and it’s not hard to see why students might expect more from their e-textbooks than what they currently get.

Reducing the Clicks from User to Content

As the back-to-class season draws closer, a number of course materials systems are hooking up.

At its own BbWorld annual conference in New Orleans, Blackboard announced plans to develop one-click access to Ingram’s Vital Source e-textbook platform directly within the Blackboard Learn learning management system. The integration, intended for both computers and mobile devices, will allow faculty and students already logged into Learn to click into digital course content without messing around with software or additional logins. Vital Source has 80,000 titles.

Blackboard is also getting a little cozier with CourseSmart. Since last November, the two have been working with 20 campuses to pilot integration of CourseSmart’s Building Block digital catalog with Blackboard Learn. Like the Vital Source arrangement, the integration enables users to access the course materials with a single sign-on. The pilot was apparently successful as Blackboard will now make Building Block available at no charge to all schools using Learn 9.1.

For its part, CourseSmart has also been dancing with Desire2Learn. In an enhanced integration announced recently, CourseSmart’s 30,000-title e-textbook catalog will be available through Desire2Learn’s learning management system. Once again, students and instructors will be able to get there via just one click.

Technology Giving Classrooms a New Look

A new study shows that technology is leading to new ways for teachers to teach and students to learn. In fact, 75% of college students and 72% of faculty are using notebooks or netbooks as learning tools in the classroom, and 69% of students and 73% of faculty are making use of digital content, according to an article in Campus Technology.

The report Learn Now, Lecture Later, funded by CDW-G, a company providing technology to government, education, and healthcare industries, suggests students prefer a mix of teaching methods, such as hands-on projects (17% of participating students), independent study (14%), and group projects (12%), and that 69% of students would like to see more technology used. The study also showed that 64% of high school teachers are using class time for group projects and 45% of their students have used smartphones in class as learning tools.

“Students told us they want more interaction with teachers during class, as well as the opportunity to incorporate more technology into their classes,” said Andy Lausch, vice president of higher education at CDW-G. “In fact, students who are very satisfied with how their teachers use class time also use more technology in class with all types of learning models.”

The greatest obstacle facing to using more technology in the classroom for secondary and postsecondary education is securing funds to provide it. Lack of time and lack of technical support were also cited by IT staffers participating in the survey.

The complete report is available for free at the CDW-G web site.

MHE Offering LearnSmart Directly to Students

McGraw-Hill Education announced plans to make its LearnSmart adaptive learning program available directly to students in time for fall 2012 classes. The plan, an effort to open new revenue streams for the company, is the first time MHE has marketed and sold technology directly to students.

“Making these study tools available directly to students—and their parents who want to help them succeed—signals a new era for our business as we work to ensure that more students are getting the most out of their college education,” Brian Kibby, president, McGraw-Hill Education, said in a press release.

Use of LearnSmart has grown to more than 40 introductory courses since it was introduced in 2007, with MHE reporting more than 800,000 students use it to answer questions each day. But many college store professionals view publishers bypassing them in favor of selling directly to students as a threat instead of just “good business” on the part of the publisher, according to Mark Nelson, chief information officer of NACS and vice president of NACS Media Solutions.

“On one level, it is a threat, but if stores were providing sufficient value to publishers, particularly on the digital side, the publishers would have no need to go around the stores,” he said. “Stores have good mechanisms when it comes to print, but their mechanisms for handling new business models and technologies are inadequate.”

Another issue is that MHE plans to continue to sell the product in campus stores as part of the McGraw-Hill Connect online course-management platform, which combines digital learning with class materials. But rather than a call to arms, Nelson sees the news as an opportunity for stores to work with publishers to define better solutions.

“Publishers themselves would be stronger working with us,” he said. “If stores want it to stop, then they must more effectively demonstrate value. Complaining or continuing to do things the way they have always done them or resisting change does not do a whole lot to get the publishers to alter their practices.” 

MOOC Provider Multiplies Partner Schools

Coursera, an organization that provides a platform for free college and university courses online, created a stir when, seemingly in one fell swoop, it added a dozen more schools to its roster.

Signing on to offer selected topics through the platform were Georgia Tech, Duke University, University of Washington, Caltech, Rice University, University of Edinburgh, University of Toronto, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, Johns Hopkins University (School of Public Health), University of California San Francisco, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Virginia. Already on board are University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, University of Michigan, Stanford University, and an institution in France.

Some in academia, including this commentary in Inside Higher Education, viewed the announcement as validation that MOOCs (massive open online courses) are no longer a novelty but a genuine game-changer for postsecondary institutions. But it’s not clear exactly how they will change the educational playbook.

The Atlantic provided an inside peek at how an instructor approaches a MOOC, noting that many of those who take the courses already hold degrees, maybe even advanced degrees. These students aren’t necessarily seeking another diploma, though possibly they do want some sort of formal acknowledgment they successfully completed the course, which is something Coursera can provide. A certificate would come in handy for resumes or performance reviews.

Some course-takers are instructors themselves, maybe checking out the “competition” or looking to crib a few ideas for their own classes. Coursera’s course list, at least for now, is heavy on science-related disciplines. No doubt that’s where the demand is.

Is the Time Right for BYOT?

Making use of the technology many students bring to class each day is a touchy subject. Many educators view it as a distraction and even more see it as unfair to those students who cannot afford electronic gadgets, such as an iPhone or Kindle. But that could be changing.

Eric Sheninger, principal of New Milford High School in New Jersey and education writer for The Huffington Post, makes a case for the idea of “Bring Your Own Technology” in a SmartBlog post,  claiming a BYOT program is a way to “leverage a variety of devices that many students already have.” His school piloted a BYOT initiative for seniors, and then expanded it because he felt the program provided real value for both students and teachers.

Sheninger found that students need to view their devices as mobile learning tools and that the school had to adopt language to promote that notion. It’s also important to have professional development and resources available to teachers so they can create lessons specifically connected to the device.

The New Milford BYOT program increased access to technology and encouraged students to use their devices for educational purposes outside the classroom. Acceptable-use policies were required, but it was found those policies could be aligned with policies already in place a school’s discipline code.

In addition, Sheninger knows equity is a large issue facing BYOT and agrees schools should provide for all. But he also considers it an excuse for not moving forward.

“Instead of bashing BYOT and saying how and why it won’t work or is unfair, we would be best served to brainstorm ways in which it can become an educational component of our schools,” he wrote. “The excuses to write off BYOT only serve to undermine the students that we are tasked with educating.”

Textbook Guru Reviews E-Book Platforms

Jeff Cohen, CEO of CampusBook.com and author of The Textbook Guru blog, decided if he was going to review e-book platforms, he might as well actually buy an e-book and give it a spin. Then, he wrote a series of blogs about the college textbook platforms he tried, with a final post that links to each review.

Cohen went online, bought a textbook, and downloaded it, just as a student would. He also made sure to check out features from each provider in an effort to give readers a true snapshot of how well those features worked for him. He found that each platform he tried had both good and bad features, but that the entire higher education e-book industry has work to do because current models still suffer from “small-scale book-mimicry.”

Onlyindie.com Turning Heads

Onlyindie.com, an online e-bookseller, has been in operation just a few months, yet its business model is turning heads in the publishing industry. The privately owned company calls itself the world’s first dynamically priced e-book store.   

Onlyindie actually gives away the first 15 downloads of the title. Each e-book downloaded after that increases in penny increments until it reaches a maximum price of $7.98, where it remains until 24 hours pass without a download. At that point, the company uses an algorithm that over a period of time lowers the price back to zero again.

Writers receive 50% of the sale price on books priced up to $1.99. That increases to 75% for books priced $2 to $7.98. Although authors are permitted to set their price limit lower than $7.98, they cannot increase it. Authors are paid via Paypal with no minimums and no waiting for the check.

The web site got a big boost when Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban agreed to have his book, How to Win, sold using Onlyindie’s model, even besting the price-busting Amazon for some time. The bookhowever, is no longer on the web site.

As of July 13, 2012, Onlyindie.com had 20 free e-books available and 31 at varying prices below $7.98. The e-book categories were typical for the trends this year, including some vampire tales, adult fiction, advice and how-to, science fiction and fantasy, and short stories.

More Uses for Smartphones Than Just Calls

News that people are using smartphones for much more than simply calling is not particularly earthshattering. But two new reports have surfaced that put numbers behind the trend.

The London Telegraph produced a chart showing smartphone users spend 24 minutes, 49 seconds every day surfing the Internet on their devices, compared to just 12 minutes, six seconds taking calls. In fact, using the phone as a phone was fifth on the list behind using it for social media (17 minutes, 29 seconds), playing music (15 minutes, 38 seconds), and playing games (14 minutes, 26 seconds).

The Online Colleges infographic below, which focuses on smartphone usage by college students, shows that 52% check their phone before getting out of bed in the morning and nearly half take a look before falling asleep at night. Of the students surveyed, 45% use their phones to help with school assignments and 46% say their phones are often more helpful for work-related tasks. Alarmingly, 35% of the students surveyed say they use their phones while stopped at a red light and 20% admit using them while driving.

Courtesy of: Online Colleges

Bankrolling Free Textbooks Via Donations

Some see a simple path to affordable college textbooks: Have each professor write their own course materials and distribute them gratis to enrollees (maybe charge a tad for hard copies). A tiny, but slowly growing, number of faculty are willing to do that.

The downside for students is that raw manuscripts aren’t necessarily as readable and user-friendly as traditionally published textbooks buffed by a team of peer reviewers, editors, proofers, graphic designers, technology magicians, and the like. The price might be free, but sometimes you get what you pay for. A prof could hire services to polish a book, but would either have to eat the cost or charge students much more for the end product.

A Canadian professor tapped into crowdsourcing as a way to have his free book and edit it, too. In a post about faculty putting their own books online, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog noted how Brendan Myers, a professor of philosophy and humanities at Heritage College in Quebec, solicited pledges through Kickstarter to cover professional editing, publishing, and peer-review fees for the philosophy textbook he’s writing. He plans to make the finished book available free to anyone through a Creative Commons license.

Kickstarter provides an online fundraising platform for creative projects, such as novels and films. Myers aimed to raise $5,000, but when his pledge drive ended July 7, he had $16,872 from 707 supporters. The extra will pay for a French translation, English and French audio versions, study guides, and a professional cast to record a dramatic reading of classic philosophy works.

Who knows why 707 people chose to donate to a philosophy text? Maybe some are professors who hope to use the book for their own classes, or budget-minded students planning to take Myers’ course next year, or current students sucking up for a better grade. Certainly, it seems unlikely there are enough donors out there to support an open-access textbook for every higher-education class, but contributions might float a few titles.

Compare Myers’ success at textbook fundraising with that of marketing/branding guru Seth Godin, who’s published a passel of books the old-fashioned way and is now also using Kickstarter to fund a retail campaign for his upcoming title. As of July 12, Godin had raised $267,675 from 3,925 contributors, with four days to go before the deadline. More than 1,000 of the donors gave $100 or more.

Chegg Testing More Services on New Site

When Dan Rosenweig took over as Chegg’s CEO, he became certain the next big challenge facing the online textbook rental company was going to come from digital course materials.

Rosenweig invested $50 million on acquisitions he hopes will turn Chegg into a digital destination that can fill every need a college student may have, from course materials to homework help to dorm decorations. The firm began testing an enhanced Chegg.com site on June 1 that brings together all the services Chegg has purchased or created.

The new site allows students to use their Facebook credentials to login, providing Chegg with information about its users, social networks used, and where each individual goes to school. New services allow students to answer questions posed by others for free or a small fee, help high school seniors narrow their college search, or receive daily-deal offers from a subscription-based service.

The new Chegg web site is what Facebook might have become had it remained limited to universities, according to Michelle Hummel, CEO of the digital marketing agency Web Media Expert, in this article for Bloomburg Business, adding that students and educators are “looking for something other than Facebook that’s more targeted to their needs.”

E-Books Are Getting into Your Head

Companies selling electronic readers and e-books are tracking the reading and spending habits of users with an eye to helping authors and publishers better understand what readers want, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. Books for the Kindle and Nook, as well as tablets such as the iPad, can record the number of times a reader opens a book app and how much time they spend using the app, and then provide that information to retailers and publishers.

“The bigger trend we’re trying to unearth is where are those drop-offs in certain kinds of books, and what can we do with publishers to prevent that,” said Jim Hilt, vice president of e-books at Barnes & Noble, in the WSJ article. “If we can help authors create even better books than they create today, it’s a win for everybody.”

The article details how e-book social networking site Copia, which has 50,000 subscribers, collects information including age, gender, and school affiliation, as well as how many times a book was downloaded, opened, and read, and shares that data with publishers that request it. Kobo, with a stock of 2.5 million books and more than eight million users of its devices and services, tracks the hours users spend reading a title, while Scholastic uses online feedback from message boards and interactive games to shape its 39 Clues series.

Sourcebooks is also incorporating reader feedback into print versions of some of its online serial titles.

“You very rarely get a glimpse into the reader’s mind,” said David Levithan, publisher and editorial director at Scholastic. “With a printed book, there’s no such thing as an analytic. You can’t tell which pages are dog-eared.”

But there are those who disagree with such data gathering. Privacy groups would like to see e-book users protected from having their reading habits recorded. California passed a “reader privacy act” making it more difficult for law-enforcement groups to access consumers’ digital reading records, legislation that the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF), Google, and other organizations are also promoting.

“There’s a societal ideal that what you read is nobody else’s business,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the EEF. “Right now, there’s no way for you to tell Amazon, ‘I want to buy your books, but I don’t want you to track what I’m reading.’”

Has 'Innovation' Become a Mindless Buzzword?

The Wall Street Journal ran an article in May suggesting that the term “innovation” has been overused to the point of being cliché. The report showed the word was used 33,528 times in Security and Exchange Commission filings, an increase of 64% over the last five years, and that Amazon.com had 250 books released between February and May 2012 with the work “innovation” in the title.

It’s a subject Jason Tomassini of Education Week has been thinking about for a while. Tomassini followed up a blog on the influx of “innovation officers” in education by gathering responses he received from people who write about and study educational practices on his first post and the WSJ article.

“It’s not that our education system doesn’t desperately need to be shaken up. But as the WSJ article makes clear, we are applying these adjectives without any analysis, without any reference to history,” wrote Audrey Watters, an education technology writer and blogger for Hack Education. “It’s just marketing schtick and sloppy thinking—and I think that’s both disappointing and dangerous when we want to see substantive change in education and are stuck instead with seeing the mediocre and the mundane touted as transformative.”

Collaborative Efforts on OER Show Promise

Open educational resources are attractive for both students and faculty because, in large part, they are free or very inexpensive.  However, finding and sorting through all the available OER for high-quality materials is a daunting proposition for most faculty members, making recent collaborative efforts between institutions a solution with considerable potential.

“Helping faculty find appropriate resources is a major issue,” said Geoff Cain, director of distance education for the College of the Redwoods, Eureka, CA, in a recent article in Campus Technology. Cain is a member of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, a joint effort to help faculty identify and evaluate appropriate resources.

Another effort, Project Kaleidoscope, brought together faculty teams from eight institutions across the U.S. to design 10 general education courses that use OER materials and share common learning assessments.

The Kaleidoscope courses were used for the first time in the fall of 2011 with promising results. According to a report in Campus Technology, there was a 3.5% improvement in student success (completion with a C or better) in the courses, while students participating in the Kaleidoscope classes saw a 97% reduction in textbook costs.

“It’s so frustrating to community college teachers when their students show up the first week without textbooks because they are waiting for a paycheck or for financial aid,” said M.L. Bettino, former dean of academic affairs at Cerritos College and primary investigator for the Kaleidoscope program. “Now they can get their hands on these materials early and really be prepared on day one.”

New Retail Site Harnesses Consumers' Likes

Building off the rocketing popularity of Pinterest, a new online recommendation site called Wisemarkit allows users to get a cut of the action when someone buys a product they endorsed. The site’s founders hope to drive sales through shopper-to-shopper buzz.

Wisemarkit, which launched July 2, has an interface reminiscent of Pinterest and even requires new users to request an invitation to set up an account, just as Pinterest does. Once an account is open, the user can recommend up to 10 items by pinning pictures and descriptions on a profile page. If somebody clicks through to purchase one of the items, Wisemarkit not only shares the revenue with the recommender but also awards points that can be redeemed to upgrade the profile page with additional features.

At present, Wisemarkit only sources merchandise through Amazon Affiliates and Shopsense programs, but intends to start signing up retail establishments soon, according to a Fast Company report. Retailers could also create accounts applauding their top sellers or hot, new arrivals. A ranking function will also show how many recommendations a product has garnered.

Why restrict accounts to just 10 recommendations at any given time and not an unlimited number? Wisemarkit thinks account-holders will only vouch for those products they really like, which in turn will generate more click-through sales.

Technology and the Older Generation

It’s the Fourth of July, so what better way to kick off this most American of celebrations than with a short YouTube clip from Germany? You may not understand a word of it, but it should provide a chuckle.

Enjoy, and have a safe and happy Fourth.

School Officials Playing Catchup with Technology

The Project Tomorrow report, Speak Up 2011Personalizing the Classroom Experience suggests educators and librarians have taken noticed that students accept the do-it-yourself approach to education that has been made possible through new technologies.

The report, a survey of representing students, parents, teachers, librarians, and administrators from more than 5,800 public and private K-12 schools, shows that educators utilizing social networking sites for professional use has risen from 22% in 2008 to 45% in 2011, Additionally, more than a third of teachers responding are now using online professional learning communities (PLC), compared to one in five just four years ago.

The study suggests a shift in thinking about students bringing devices into the classroom is possible as more educators become familiar with using the technology. The study found that those educators see the gadgets as a way to “increase student engagement (83%), access online textbooks (73%), and extend learning beyond the end of the school day (63%).” The report also found that 27% of administrators surveyed feel that allowing students to bring their own mobile devices into the classroom could be a technology solution to budget issues.

At the same time, the report also states that harnessing the potential of technology in the classroom continues to be a challenge because of all the new tools and services that are available. All the choices make it difficult to choose the best product or app, or to even evaluate which tools work best.

Report Shows Retailers Struggle with Digital Shopping Experience

Traditional retail channels are having a hard time mixing digital into the shopping experience, according to a new report, Omni-Channel 2012: Cross Channel Comes of Age from Retail Systems Research LLC. The firm has been doing the study for six years and this year found that retailers now feel cross-channel marketing will play a role in their business but that merging digital with the bricks-and-mortar selling is the biggest challenge.

The report surveyed 66 retailers on their cross-channel practices and technology adoption plans and found that just 32% of the responding retailers believe they have reached the goal of consolidating the customer shopping experience across all channels.

The report is available as a free download, but registration is required.