Webinar Looks at Future of Course Materials

To find out what lies ahead for the creation and distribution of learning content, NACS commissioned an extensive research and analysis project which involved interviews with dozens of people involved in higher education instruction and administration, academic publishing, content distribution and sales, and libraries and educational technology.

The findings from that project and their implications for higher ed will be examined in a free webinar, Exploring the Future Course Content Ecosystem on Campus, on Tuesday, Dec. 1, at 1 p.m. Eastern. The project and webinar were underwritten by the NACS Foundation.

The webinar will touch on changes in teaching and learning—as well as student access and affordability issues—that are driving the development of new kinds of course materials and in-class instructional materials. These include digital versions of textbooks, courseware that combines reading material and teaching modules, adaptive learning content, and open educational resources (OER).

As the needs of faculty and students have shifted over the years, so has the role of the campus bookstore. The webinar will discuss how stores will fit into the new course-content landscape and what strategies stores can adopt to support students’ and instructors’ success.

Presenting the webinar will be Tony Ellis, CAE, vice president, industry advancement, NACS.

Advance registration for the webinar is required. If you haven’t already set up a NACS login, you will be prompted to create one before registering.

Students Want Learning Analytics Tools

Students want the instant feedback available through learning analytics technology. In fact, 87% of the students surveyed for The Impact of Technology on College Student Study Habits said such technology can have a positive impact on their academic performance.

More than 2,600 college students participated in the survey, conducted by McGraw-Hill Education and Hanover Research. The students ranged from freshmen to Ph.D. students in a mix of majors.

“Students today have a desire for immediate and continual feedback,” said Peter Cohen, group president of U.S. Education at McGraw-Hill Education. “By using technology to deliver learning experiences that leverage those motivations, we can capitalize on an enormous opportunity to improve learning outcomes. Adaptive learning technology provides just that kind of actionable, real-time feedback, and does so in a way that’s incredibly personalized.”

Nearly 85% of the responding students said they experienced moderate or major improvements in their grades using adaptive learning technology, while 67% reported the technology made them feel better prepared for class and 57% said it helped improve study efficiency. The study also found that while 84% of students said technology helps instructors to be more effective in class, 86% felt there was still room for improvement in its use.

More Working Students on Campus

A 2015 Georgetown University study found that more than 70% of college students worked while attending school over the last 25 years. The percentage of working students increased throughout the last quarter century, except for the years during and after the recession of 2008.

The study, Learning While Earning: The New Normal, reported that students work an average of 30 hours each week and 25% are working full time. It also found that educational costs have increased to the point where even a full-time work schedule is generally not enough to cover the bills.

“Today, almost every college student works, but you can’t work your way through college anymore,” Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, said in a report for CNBC. “Even if you work, you have to take out loans and take on debt.”

Seven in 10 college graduates had student-loan debt in 2014 and the average amount owed was nearly $29,000, according to the Institute for College Access and Success. The Georgetown research found that while 14% of working learners had student debt of more than $50,000, 22% of nonworking students carried similar obligations.

The report also pointed out that working provides hands-on experience, even when the job isn’t related to a student’s major.

“Working while one is still in school enhances the ability to meet deadlines, work under pressure, and effectively structure time blocks,” said Wendy Patrick, business ethics lecturer at San Diego State University. “It instills a sense of discipline, responsibility, structure—all elements that contribute to a successful life.”

Students Depend on Campus Store

Despite reports to the contrary, the campus store remains an important resource for course materials, according to a student panel survey conducted by OnCampus Research. The study found that 73% of the students said it was extremely important or very important to have a physical store on campus that sells course materials.

The survey also reported that 62% of students bought course materials in their campus store in the past year, compared to 27% who said they acquired course materials through the store’s website. In addition, 78% of students living on campus acquired course materials at their college store.

The survey also found 80% of community college students said a physical store on campus that sold course materials was important. The survey found that 71% purchased school supplies from the campus store, 37% bought food and beverages, and 36% picked up apparel and school-logo wear.

Apple Watch Looks Like a Hit

Apple could have another big seller on its hands. The computer giant hasn’t revealed sales figures for its Apple Watch, but the marketing research firm Canalys reported that Apple shipped more of the devices in the last 15 months than all other vendors combined.

Canalys found that Apple shipped nearly seven million Apple Watches since its debut in late April. The firm also suggested that supply problems at the launch kept shipment numbers down.

“After experiencing significant supply-chain constraints early on, Apple managed to overcome its production struggles with the Apple Watch and is building momentum going into the fourth quarter,” an analyst at Canalys said. “Shipments are steadily increasing as it has greatly expanded the watch’s channel footprint internationally.”

Canalys reported that Pebble shipped 200,000 units during the third quarter. During the same time period, Apple shipped more than 300,000 units and was the only smartwatch maker to do so.

More Students Want Fitness Tech than Tablets

While tablets are must-have technology for some people, the devices haven’t yet reached that status with college students. A new survey shows 93.9% of students own a laptop but only 48.4% possess a tablet and 9.3% have a tablet/laptop combo.

With the holiday season approaching, does that mean tablets are high on the wish lists for the 42% of students who don’t have one? Not necessarily. The October 2015 campus survey from OnCampus Research reveals only 16.3% of all respondents said they expect to purchase a tablet in the next 12 months, while 11.6% will be seeking out a new laptop and 12.2% will buy a tablet/laptop hybrid. Those numbers, though, include students who intend to swap their current device for a brand-new model, not just first-timers.

However, the largest slice of students—20.8%—are looking to buy fitness technology in the next year while 14.9% want other types of wearable technology, such as a GoPro. About 16.7% of students already own some kind of fitness gadget, but just 6.5% have a nonfitness-related wearable.

Even though many people deem desktop computers and e-readers to be “old-school” tech and predict they’ll disappear from the market shortly, some college students don’t agree. About 33.6% of students still own a desktop and 12.3% even plan to buy a new one in the coming months. More than a quarter of students have an e-reader, with 11.4% expecting to purchase a new device this year.

OnCampus Research, part of indiCo, a division of NACS, fields surveys on different topics every month to a panel of more than 14,000 college and university students.

Online Cheating Becomes Big Business

In 2014, the market research firm Global Industry Analyst projected online education would be a $100 billion business by 2015. That value will only grow if the public begins to see online degrees as carrying the same weight as the ones earned in a traditional college classroom.

It’s also the kind of money that can bring out the cheater in some. Businesses are already cropping up that will assume students’ identities and do their coursework for them, for a fee.

“If a goal of online education proponents is to convince the public and employers that an online education is as official and prestigious as a traditional one earned in brick-and-mortar and Ivy classrooms, it’s hard to imagine anything more damaging than identity-fraud schemes in which students literally pay for grades but do no work whatsoever,” wrote Derek Newton in his report in The Atlantic. “At least with a traditional degree, the assumption is the recipient actually went to class personally.”

Newton also suspects there may be more to online cheating than Internet firms making money off people who want college credit without doing the work. He suggested that the low cost of production and the high number of students an online course can reach could be an incentive for institutions to concern themselves less with online cheating.

“In at least this way, it seems both the schools and the cheating providers have a similar economic incentive: They may both profit by having more online students,” he wrote.

Newton noted there are steps available to cut down on online impersonation. Using video technology for more direct engagement between the students and teacher is one avenue. Another would be to encourage more interaction between students themselves.

“If online college programs are ever going to compete with traditional ones, the advocates and providers should at least acknowledge the threat of online cheating and take steps to stop it—even if that means increasing costs and slowing the growth of online options,” he wrote.

Campus IT Pros See Bright Future for OER

The 2015 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology found that 92% of responding faculty and 97% of administrators agreed that open educational resources (OER) should be used more in the classroom. Now, the informational technology pros on campus have chimed in.

The Campus Computer Survey found that 81% of responding technology officers said OER will be an important source of instructional material in the next five years. They also said that 38% of their institutions are encouraging faculty to use OER, up from 33% just a year ago.

The top priority for campus IT officials is helping faculty members integrate information technology into their lessons, according to a blog post in The Chronicle of Higher Education. However, the report also found that just 17% of campuses include instructional IT as part of the faculty review and promotion process.

“This is what IT officers think is important, but then we’ve got the continuing struggle,” said Kenneth C. Green, founding director of the survey. “Why is it that we don’t recognize the faculty members who do that as part of review and promotion?”

Providing user support and having qualified IT staff were next on the priority list, followed by network security and leveraging IT for student success.

New Measures of MOOC Success

Low completion rates remain an issue for massive open online courses (MOOCs). However, that’s not the only measure of success, according to leaders of the MOOC initiative at Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA.

Elke M. Leeds, associate vice president of technology-enhanced learning, and Jim Cope, executive director of distance learning, reported in the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration that they found success in the MOOC initiative at KSU by looking at return on financial investment, branding, and student access.

“The new proposition shifts measures of success beyond just course completion to include measures that benefit students, faculty, and the institution,” they wrote in “MOOCs: Branding, Enrollment, and MultipleMeasures of Success.” “Students benefited through access to open educational resources, the acquisition of professional learning units at no cost, and the potential of college credit at a greatly reduced cost. Academic units benefited through a mechanism to attract students and future revenue, while the university benefited through digital impressions, branding, institutionally leveraged scalable learning environments, streamlined credit evaluations processes, and expanded digital education.”

Leeds and Cope determined that if four students enrolled in the institution’s two-year associated graduate endorsement program after taking a MOOC, their tuition would cover the production, design, and delivery costs of the MOOC. The first MOOC did much better than that, with 100 professional learning units awarded and 12 students enrolled in the endorsement program.

To evaluate the branding effect of the MOOC initiative at KSU, Leed and Cope documented more than 25,000 Twitter hashtag tweets and retweets about the program. They determined that 75% of the learners had either never heard of Kennesaw State or were largely unfamiliar with it, but all were engaged with learning materials produced by the university.

Leeds and Cope also reported that the program’s video lectures had more than 80,000 viewers, and nearly 4,000 unique viewers over a 10-month period in 2014. After just six weeks of offering MOOCs in 2015, they recorded more than 25,000 unique viewers to lectures, 28,000 streaming views, and more than 6,000 downloads of course materials.

“The traditional measures of success based on participation, retention, and completion only tell one side of the MOOC success story,” the authors wrote. “They can drive recruitment, offer cost reduction, and, in essence, become an educational product with reach far beyond that typically available to the university.”

Should Apple Buy a University?

Rumor has it that the next big thing from Apple could be an electric car. Economist Alex Tabarrok would rather see the computer giant sink its cash into a university.

To Tabarrok, an Apple University could serve as the proving ground for educational technologies. He envisions an institution of higher education that could become a leader in online technologies, artificial-intelligence tutors, and virtual-reality experimentation.

In addition, Apple’s worldwide reputation would help attract the best students, which would create a greater demand for Apple educational products. The firm has already started the process with iTunes U and training courses in business and design, according to Tabarrok.

“More than a century ago, Stanford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller used their industrial-age fortunes to build some of our best universities,” Tabarrok wrote in Marginal Revolution. “Isn’t it time for another great university built for the information age?”

Conference to Work on Textbook Affordability

The cost of course materials has become a white-hot issue in higher education, with fingers of blame pointed in multiple directions. The second annual Textbook Affordability Conference hopes to shift the focus to working on solutions to help students.

The 2016 conference—which aims to bring together professionals from across postsecondary academia, educational policymaking, and content production and distribution—will take place April 27-29 at the University of California-Davis.

NACS is coordinating the development of the 2016 program, which will include nationally known speakers, workshops, and discussion. Informational sessions with solution providers may also be available.

The conference is open to provosts and other higher education leaders, faculty, librarians, directors and course materials managers from campus bookstores, political leaders, open education resource developers, content providers, and others.

Registration will open later. Fees will be $400 for government aned institutional attendees, and $700 for representatives of supplier companies. Fees include all sessions, meals, and receptions.

For an overview, go to www.nacs.org/TAC.

The Disconnect Between Librarians, Faculty

Librarians appear to have a communications problem on campus. A survey, Bridging the Librarian-Faculty Gap in the Academic Library2015, reported that while 98% of librarians wish they had better communications with faculty, just 45% of the responding faculty members had the same opinion.

The survey of 500 librarians and 500 faculty members, conducted by Library Journal and the publishing company Gale, reported that 27% of faculty members think there is no need to consult with librarians about course reserves. One faculty respondent in the survey even claimed “faculty does not view the library as an up-to-date resource,” while another said Google Scholar was more essential than the library, according to a report in eCampus News.

In addition, 57% of faculty members who engaged with librarians said they worked together to provide resources, while only 31% of librarians agreed. Two-third of librarians rated libraries as being “excellent” or “above average” at creating collections of content to support curricula, while just 54% of faculty agreed.

“As more pressure is put on higher-education institutions to measure outcomes, there needs to be greater recognition of the value the library brings to the table,” said Paul Gazzolo, senior vice president and general manager for Gale. “From the survey, it’s clear that there is opportunity and need to ingrain the library in campus culture—which will ultimately elevate the learning experience, a common goal for all stakeholders.”

Faculty suggested dedicated library liaisons for each department could be part of the solution, while the librarians want more chances to attend faculty meetings, as well as commitments from the institution to embed library-taught research skills. 

Scanner Could Be a Problem for Publishers

Relatively cheap digital scanning technology could soon be available at your neighborhood office-supply store. The funding platform IndieGoGo.com is trying to raise money for a mass-market device that, if successful, will make it much easier to copy and share printed files and will retail for less than $400.

The Czur, pronounced “Caesar,” is able to digitize printed pages in less than a second and an entire book in a matter of minutes. The device even has software that corrects for the curves of bound pages, fingerprints, and page-to-text contrast.

The problem for Keith Darnay, online manager of The Bismarck Tribune, Bismarck, ND, is that making the copying process easier also makes it easier to illegally copy and share any type of publication, including college textbooks.

“I have no doubt the developers of this technology have nothing but good intentions. They see their device as a way to empower everyone with something that allows them to digitize personal documents or commercial publications they have purchased and owned,” Darnay wrote in a column. “But you can almost guarantee there will be those few who will take advantage of the scanner to illegally copy and distribute material that doesn’t belong to them.”

ACE Launches Alternative Credit Project

The American Council on Education (ACE) submitted 111 low- or no-cost general education online courses to be part of its new Alternative Credit Project. Forty colleges and universities participating in the program will grant credit for these courses, which include business, critical thinking and writing, foreign language, humanities, mathematics, and natural and physical sciences.

ACE will collect data from the institutions on the number of credits accepted through the program, along with the progress and success rates of students who transfer in the courses. ACE uses faculty from regionally accredited institutions to review all courses in the Alternative Credit Project Ecosystem (ACPE) before they earn a credit recommendation.

“Nontraditional students, who often are balancing multiple family and career demands, now know where they can turn to take courses that will help them reduce the time and expense required to gain a postsecondary degree or credential at a number of outstanding institutions,” Deborah Seymour, ACE assistant vice president for education attainment and innovation, said in a press release.

The cost of the courses varies, but no participating provider is charging more than $300 per course, which includes course materials except lab kits.

Need to Know About OER? Cram It

The concept of open educational resources (OER) is simple—materials are made available for all to reuse and possibly adapt, often at no fee—but putting the concept into action for college courses is a bit more complicated. How can schools efficiently get these materials to students?

OER Cram Session, hosted by NACS on Nov. 18-20, will offer a three-day schedule of live webinars and audio conferences featuring case studies, solutions, and ideas for effective management and distribution of open resources. Any professional in higher education can take part in any or all of these free events, although registration is required for each webinar in order to provide log-in details.

Several webinars focus on how campus stores are helping to facilitate the use of open resources at their institutions. Although many resources can be accessed online for free, faculty may request assistance in collating links for students or downloading materials into the school’s system. To accommodate students who prefer to study from hardcopies, stores have also been able to provide inexpensive print versions of OER materials.

In addition to the live events, a variety of free resources on OER—background information, links to repositories and programs, and articles—are also available from the Cram Session.

NACS members will also be able access recordings of the live events later on The Hub, NACS’ online connected community.

Tool That Can Write Textbooks

The old notion that machines will someday replace workers may soon apply to academia. A Pennsylvania State University professor used a robot to build a textbook that he claims saved students $16,000 last semester.

Bart Pursel assembled a textbook for his Information, People, and Technology class using BbookX, a technology developed at Penn State that helps faculty use open-source materials to create content according to topics and keywords. Using the technology, Pursel was able to distribute the textbook to his class for free.

BbookX starts with an instructor creating a digital table of contents and assigning each chapter a topic with text or related keywords. The tool then uses matching algorithms to quickly gather content, according to the university release.

The university is also exploring ways to allow the content to be changed and updated. Professors will still have to review the titles, but the goal is to provide instructors choices to build a better book in the same way Netflix bases movie selections on what a viewer has previously watched.

“While building my textbook, I came across subjects and topics I hadn’t known about before,” Pursel said in a blog for The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I was able to learn something new and then pass that along to my students.”

Online Learning Perception Gap Remains

The gap between what administrators and faculty members think about the quality of online education has widened, according to the 2015 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology. However, the groups do agree that textbooks are too expensive.

The survey, conducted by Gallup, of 2,175 faculty members and 105 administrators found that 63% of faculty members and 84% of administrators said they believe investment in educational technology is money well spent. At the same time, just 20% of faculty and 17% of administrators have seen significant gains in student outcomes.

Just 17% of responding faculty members said for-credit online courses have student outcomes at least equivalent to those taught in person, down from 26% in the 2014 survey. The numbers for administrators were much more positive, as 62% said online courses were of the same quality as in-person classes. That number rises to 88% if the course is being offered at the administrator’s institution.

When it comes to course materials, 93% of faculty and 98% of administrators said they believe they are too expensive. Open educational resources (OER) get high marks, with 92% of faculty and 97% of administrators agreeing that instructors should assign such content more often. However, Inside Higher Ed has also conducted research that found many faculty members have never heard of OER, and those who have don’t know where to find such materials.

“These new data from Gallup make it clear that faculty understand the problems with textbooks and other commercial course materials and are very positive of OER,” said David Wiley, chief academic officer of Lumen Learning. “Both moves significantly decrease students’ cost to graduate while increasing faculty’s pedagogical flexibility.”

Student Assessment Tool Being Developed

The U.S. Department of Education awarded Excelsior College a $1.9 million grant to develop a solution colleges and universities can use to evaluate students’ readiness  for college-level work. The Diagnostic Assessment and Achievement of College Skills (DAACS) will be an open-source tool that allows institutions to identify at-risk students and provide them the resources necessary to succeed.

The program is designed to offer students feedback on their weaknesses and provide information for relearning content, according to a report in eCampus News. DAACS will include academic and nonacademic (i.e., academic self-regulation and test anxiety) evaluations so college and universities will have a better understanding of students and develop learning strategies based on their needs.

“Because of its focus on generating actionable feedback and its direct link to effective support services and resources, DAACS has the potential to empower and enable students to become more purposeful and strategic learners,” said Timothy Cleary, associate professor, Rutgers Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology. “This project is particularly exciting because it can positively influence the ways in which students—as well as faculty—respond to the inevitable challenges and struggles that so many students experience during college.”

Rutgers University and the University at Albany, Albany, NY, are partners with Excelsior on the DAACS project. Once the tool is finished, Excelsior and Western Governors University will conduct pilot studies on its usefulness.

Apple Loses Patent Suit to UW

Apple’s losing streak in court continued as a jury in U.S. District Court found the company infringed on a 1998 patent held by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, when it used certain processors in the iPhone 5S, iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and some iPads. InformationWeek reported that Apple has been ordered to pay $234 million in damages.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which filed the suit, was asking for $400 million. The foundation filed a second lawsuit in September, claiming Apple’s new A9 and A9X processors used in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus and the iPad Pro also infringe on its patents.

Apple claimed the patent was invalid, but the jury in the Madison District Court disagreed. The research foundation also said it had offered the license to Apple for a fee.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the plaintiff made an aggressive push for willfulness enhancements,” Florian Mueller, an expert in patent-infringement lawsuits, told Forbes. “But in the past, damages awards of this proportion have typically been reduced on appeal.”

The university filed the patent for technology that enhanced the efficiency of computer processors in 1998. When the research foundation, which handles licensing of technology invented by university researchers, sued Intel for infringing on the same patent, it ended up with a $110 million lump-sum settlement.

Tool Puts Store into Content Discussion

There’s a new tool that can help college stores be part of course-materials discussions. SIPX Campus makes it possible for campus entities, such as the college store, to set up course readings on behalf of instructors.

The tool is one of three created by ProQuest SIPX, a provider of digital course material solutions. SIPX Central allows instructors to select course readings through a self-service, cloud-based interface. SIPX for MOOCs enables course readings for massive open online courses to be organized for an institution by the company’s service team and simplifies copyright permissions, according to a report for Campus Technology.

The tools also provide free access to course-relevant content to students, tools for sharing nonsubscribed copyrighted materials, and analytics to monitor student engagement with assignments. 

Online Students Getting Younger

Students’ comfort level with online educational programs is growing, in part because so many students now take online courses in high school.

For instance, Florida high school students are required to take at least one online course to graduate, while community colleges across the country continue to offer more courses in online and hybrid formats. That has led to an increase in the number of online undergraduates ages 18-24, according to a 2015 survey from Aslanian Market Research and The Learning House.

“They’re a lot more comfortable than, I think, even five years, 10 years ago, just in terms of using that technology,” Andrea Reese, chair of online studies at Daytona State College, said of online students in U.S. News and World Report. “That intimidation factor is gone.”

Nearly 1,800 students ages 18-24 enrolled for the 2013-14 academic year in the online Pennsylvania State University-World Campus, a 60% increase over the year before. The age group made up 21% of the entire undergraduate online student body, a 3% increase over the 2012-13 school year, according to Karen Pollack, assistant vice provost for the undergraduate online and blended programs.

“Possibly living at home, not paying room and board, having the flexibility that they can work 10-15 hours a week to help fund their college education—that is their reality,” Pollack said of the PSU-World Campus experience. “Given the circumstances, it’s their best option.”

MIT Pilots Online Master's Program

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is giving inverted admissions a try in a pilot for students in its supply chain management (SCM) master’s degree program. Students who successfully complete the first semester of SCM courses online will become eligible for admission to the Cambridge, MA, campus for one semester to complete the degree.

“Inverted admission has the potential to disrupt traditional modes of access to higher education,” said Sanjay Sarma, dean of digital learning, in a report for MIT News. “We’re democratizing access to a master’s program for learners worldwide.”

The pilot includes a new academic credential developed by MIT called MicroMaster’s. Students will earn the digital credential after taking a proctored examination of materials covered in first-semester classes from MITx, the portfolio of free MIT courses available online through the interactive learning platform edX.

There are no admissions requirements for the courses, which are available to anyone interested in taking them. Learners will have to pay a small fee to have their MicroMaster’s verified, but then they can apply for admissions to the semester on campus with the MicroMaster’s worth a semester of MIT credit.

“The rising cost of education, combined with the transformative potential of online teaching and learning technologies, presents a long-term challenge that no university can afford to ignore,” said MIT President Rafael Reif. “At MIT, we are choosing to meet this challenge directly by assessing the educational model that has served the institute so well for so long. We are experimenting boldly with ideas to enhance the education we offer our own students and to lower the barriers to access for learners around the world.”

Open E-Textbooks Slammed for Errors

Writing digital textbooks intended for free use by educators may not be as easy as it seems.

A group of Michigan social studies teachers, as part of the Michigan Open Book Project, spent a year developing e-textbooks for four subjects: high school economics, sixth-grade world geography, fourth-grade U.S. regions, and fifth-grade American history. Funded by a $600,000 state education grant, the project’s aim is to create books any Michigan school system can download at no charge.

However, the first four books were released in August to heavy criticism. “Some textbook experts and educators around the state are so disturbed by factual inaccuracies, poor grammar, overgeneralizations, clumsy word choices, and cultural insensitivity, they are recommending teachers not use them in their classrooms,” reported The Detroit News.

One curriculum reviewer said all four books “need significant editing and revision, if not complete rewriting.”

David A. Johnson, director of the Open Book Project, said the teachers selected to write the books were encouraged to create the kind of resource they would want to deploy in their own classrooms. He noted that since the books are solely online, errors can be revised within 48 hours. A tab on the download site includes a fill-in form for submitting errors and the process for evaluating submissions.

The Open Book Project intends to produce more e-books over the next two years. In development during the current school year are books for third-grade Michigan history, seventh-grade ancient world history, eighth- and ninth-grade American history, and high school civics. Planned for development in the 2016-17 academic year are books for K-2 and high school world history.

Affordable Textbook Act Reintroduced

The Affordable College Textbook Act never got off the ground when it was introduced in 2013. Now, it’s being reintroduced as Congress works on reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

The act, sponsored by Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Al Franken (D-MN) in the U.S. Senate and Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX) in the House of Representatives, would encourage the use of open-access textbooks by providing grants to schools to make free or low-cost digital content available to professors, students, and researchers.

The grant process would allow schools to conduct pilots aimed at expanding the use of open educational resources as a way to lower college expenses to students. Applicants would have to provide estimates on the potential cost savings, with priority placed on programs that save students the most.

Publishers would be required to make all textbooks and educational materials available for sale as individual pieces of content, rather than as a bundle. It also requires the Government Accountability Office to provide updates on price trends of college textbooks.

Amazon Expanding Staffed Pick-up Spots

Amazon continues to make a push on campus, now listing job opportunities at the Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses of the University of California and the University of Cincinnati. The listing appears on the company’s website and offers candidates $13.15 per hour to work at new Campus Pick-Up Point (CPP) locations.

The CPP program began last February to provide students living in dorms or apartments near campus with an easy way to receive their online orders from Amazon. It’s also seen as part of a move into the college market that includes co-branded websites with UC Davis and Purdue University and taking over course materials operations at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, according to a report in Fortune.

The Cincinnati Business Courier reported that Amazon took out a building permit in a building development near the Cincinnati campus and lists Nov. 13, 2015, as the approximate start date for employees of at that location.

However, the job postings and building permits don’t necessarily mean there’s a partnership between Amazon and the universities.  According to Fortune, a spokesperson for UC Santa Barbara said the school was not associated with any Amazon venture.

Mobile Use of Digital on the Rise

Mobile devices now account for nearly two-thirds of all digital minutes consumed, which shouldn’t come as much of a shock to collegiate retailers. However, that number is up 11% since 2013, according to a report from Digital Content Next (DCN).

The comScore 2015 Mobile App Report found that 62% of all digital usage is on mobile phones, with users spending more than 44% of their time using smartphone apps. The study also reported that fewer users turn on their desktops to go online, with digital usage at 38%, down from 49% two years ago.

The most mobile-app visits are to Facebook and Google, with Facebook accounting for nearly 126 million unique visitors. Millennials average nearly 26 hours a month on Facebook and spend two hours a day on social and entertainment apps.

“Mobile offers publishers a unique opportunity to expand their brand across platforms,” wrote Rande Price, research director of DCN. “It’s also a key opportunity to attract millennials as long-term and engaged users.”

Newest Entry in Social Media Race

KakaoTalk is a no-cost messaging app that sends messages, photos, videos, and voice notes for free. It also may be the next big thing on campus.

The app even allows users to make free conference calls over WiFi, according to Joshua Kim, a technology writer for Inside Higher Education. He reported in in early September that a number of his Korean in-laws were already using the app and wondered how long it would take before he would start seeing students using it on campus.

Apparently not very long at all. By the end of September, KakaoTalk was being offered in the App and Google Play stores as a free download, along with a smartwatch app. The key features include fast and reliable messaging, no matter the network, with free multimedia and voice call functions. Users can also see who reads their messages, send messages while in other chatrooms, and schedule appointments. It even has mobile games to play.

“From watching how my family uses KakaoTalk, I could envision a wholesale retreat from Facebook,” Kim wrote. “Facebook is too broad, too slow, and populated with too many people. KakaoTalk could be the next big higher-ed thing because it is not Facebook.”

Learning App Connects ESL Students

A number of studies have shown that students often learn concepts more quickly and thoroughly when they collaborate and help each other. With that in mind, Canada-based entrepreneur Mark Kim, working with a team of developers, created an app that allows students to tap into a social network as a means of learning English as a second language (ESL).

The new app, dubbed English on the Go, enables instructors to post short lectures from their smartphone or other mobile device. Students then access lectures from their own phones and can archive selected ones into an electronic notebook. Kim is in the process of recruiting instructors from around the world to offer English lessons in their own language, although students can opt for lessons delivered in English.

Users of the app can follow each other to practice everyday English, ask questions, and share their own knowledge and experience—such as how English terminology might vary, depending on the country or region.

The app is intended more for personal improvement than university-level academic study—lectures and user contributions are organized into themes such as food, shopping, and basketball—but it’s not hard to see how a social network available anywhere might help ramp up a student’s language skills more quickly than in-class presentations and practice sessions. The same might work for complex subjects such as mathematics or chemistry.

The copywriter for the English on the Go website might even benefit from using the app for a few lessons. According to the site, the app “is never neatly and professionally defined lectures produced in the studio, which is old-fashioned but it is live, fast reaching and real English lessons delivered by instructors from English speaking countries.”

E-Book Readership May Be Hard to Track

Are e-books gaining on print books, or losing steam? It appears to depend on who you ask.

Not long ago The New York Times kicked off the debate with an article based on sales data from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which purported to show that e-book sales drooped by 10% in the first five months of 2015. “E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television,” The Times claimed.

But wait, said The Digital Reader. Its piece noted the AAP’s sales figures failed to take into account some $1.79 billion worth of e-book transactions. “While the majority of the AAP monthly data about e-book revenues comes from the Big Five U.S. trade publishers, the majority of the non-AAP e-book revenues goes to self-published e-books and indie-published e-books,” The Digital Reader said.

For its part, The Wall Street Journal did report that the Big Five saw dwindling e-book sales after they negotiated new agency contracts to set higher retail prices.

A new Pew Research Center report indicated more readers are borrowing e-books from their local libraries. In a survey of library patrons aged 16 and up, 27% had downloaded or borrowed at least one digital book in the previous year, compared to 22% in 2012.

The Bookseller cited a YouthSight survey of 1,000 respondents aged 16-24, which found 64% preferred to read print books over digital ones. Surveys of college students, conducted by NACS’ OnCampus Research, also indicate they’d rather be reading on paper, but they’ll buy e-textbooks if the price is substantially cheaper or to fill an immediate need.

E-book subscription services, often touted as a NetFlix for e-book readers, have had trouble getting off the ground and a couple of high-profile companies recently closed, as chronicled by Mashable. The problem there, though, wasn’t a lack of readers; it boiled down to publishers not agreeing to terms that left enough margin to sustain the services.

More Shoppers Consult Amazon First

When it comes to searching for products on the web, many consumers treat Amazon like a regular Internet search engine.

In a new Survata study of American consumers, a sizable 44% indicated they head straight for Amazon’s website when they want to shop for a particular product. That means other retailers—especially smaller, independent ones—don’t even get a chance to compete for those shoppers online, unless somehow Amazon doesn’t carry the item.

Amazon’s personalization technology received high marks from respondents, with 75% saying other online sellers don’t come close and 87% indicating they’d rather do business with a site capable of ascertaining their needs and guiding them to suggested products.

Retailers have a little more opportunity to snag a sale with 34% of the survey respondents who said they look for products first on the major search engines, notably Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Just 21% of survey-takers habitually begin their search for products at a specific retail merchant.

Of consumers who use their smartphone to shop, the biggest reason (given by 47%) was to obtain information on products and prices.

Is the Amazon Six-Pack Headed to School?

Amazon is offering a six-pack of $50 Amazon Fire tablet computers for the price of five. The question is, why?

According to Adam Levy of The Motley Fool, this latest foray into tablet sales could be Amazon taking aim at the K-12 educational market. Levy points out that the number of people with families big enough to actually want six tablets might be limited. He also said that since schools are making more use of tablets, the low-cost Amazon device could be a lot more attractive than an iPad for schools facing budget issues.

“I’m not so sure Adam is really on the money here,” wrote Chris Meadows in a post for TeleRead. “iPads have a really good reputation as educational devices after all, and have built up a considerable library of quality software to aid in that purpose. Does Amazon’s software library have the educational chops necessary to compete?”

Amazon is certainly trying to develop customers for life. A company representative told the audience in an education session at CAMEX 2015 in Atlanta that’s why it is interested in on-campus locations. And what better way to do create lifetime customers than to have children using its operating system while in K-12?

However, Meadows said he believes the schools aren’t going to be thrilled that Amazon installed special advertising software into the Fire tablets that promotes its products. He also said that at less than $43, the Amazon Fire could be so inexpensive that many shoppers will see it as disposable, and may want to the six-pack just to have replacements handy.

“The point is, I don’t think it’s necessary to assume that families won’t buy into those six-packs, therefore they must be aimed at an education market,” Meadows wrote. “More than likely, some schools will be interested, but I suspect that more than enough families and even individuals will want to buy the bundles for that not to be an issue.”

Study Finds Students Need to Read

Students may not like this, but some digital textbooks can tell instructors just how much of the course reading they are actually doing. The digital text can even determine if a student fell asleep with the book open.

Not surprisingly, a new study found students who spent more time actually reading their textbooks—not just speed-skimming—got better grades. The survey of 269 undergraduates at Texas A&M University-San Antonio using digital content reported that the number of minutes spent reading was an important factor in getting better grades, but that students averaged less than three hours of reading per class.

“It’s not that students were overworked or required to read a crazy amount,” Reynol Junco, the Iowa State University professor who conducted the research, said in a report for Bloomberg Business. “The reading was pretty fair for college students.”

The good news, according to Junco, is that checking study habits can also help faculty identify students who are in trouble before they get a bad grade.

Competing with the Tennessee Promise

The Tennessee Promise allows high school students to earn an associate degree at the state’s 13 community colleges, providing they are full-time students, maintain a 2.0 grade-point average, meet regularly with a mentor in their field of study, and complete at least eight hours of community service.

The Promise helped community college enrollment jump 14% this fall, the first year the program was offered statewide. Tennessee’s four-year institutions had to compete with the free-tuition program, but enrollment figures still appear healthy.

“We beefed up our efforts,” Glenda Glover, president of Tennessee State University, Nashville, said in a report for Nashville Public Radio. “All of us have done extra work, but it looks like we overdid it because TSU enrollment is up this year.”

Enrollment figures across the six Tennessee Board of Regents schools were flat, which was actually an improvement over the trend of the last five years. Enrollment for the University of Tennessee system slipped at UT Martin and Chattanooga, but UT Knoxville reported one of its largest freshman classes ever.

Students See Benefits from MOOCs

While the Year of the MOOC didn’t pan out quite like The New York Times envisioned in 2012, there is still good news on the massive open online course front. A new study of 52,000 students who took at least one MOOC offered by Coursera found that 87% said they saw at least some career benefit from the class.

In addition, 33% of that group, which the study identified as “career builders,” said they turned the MOOC into a “tangible career benefit.”

“The tangible career benefit is a higher bar in some sense,” Gayle Christensen, assistant vice provost at the University of Washington, Seattle, and an author of the report, said in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “A third of people saying that they were able to make these clear next steps is actually something one should be optimistic about.”

The report, which looked at motivations for taking a MOOC and the educational and career results participants achieved, also found that 62% of the respondents in the career-builder category improved their work performance. The survey also identified “education-seekers” as a category and found that 88% gained general educational benefits and 18% said they received tangible educational benefits.

“Going into this, I wasn’t sure what we’d find,” Christensen said. “That those students are actually reporting career and educational benefits in higher numbers is pretty exciting.”

Texting May Keep Students on Track

Texting may be a new way to keep students engaged with their education, especially as they move from high school to college. It’s cheap, available nearly everywhere, and can be used to boost achievement and study habits, according to Benjamin Castleman.

Castleman, University of Virginia education professor and author of The 160-Character Solution: How Text Messaging and OtherBehavioral Strategies Can Improve Education, studied enrollment rates of students who were accepted into college but did not enroll for fall classes. He and his colleague, Lindsay Page of the University of Pittsburgh, reported that the number of students who decided not to attend college reached 40% in some school districts, particularly among lower-income and first-generation college students.

Castleman and Page used software that could send weekly text messages to high school graduates with deadline reminders, links to documents, and connection information for advisors. They found that 70% of students who received the personalized messages ended up enrolling for the fall semester, compared to 63% of students who didn’t receive the messages.

Other studies have revealed that texting student performance information to parents of middle and high school students in Los Angeles helped increase homework completion rates by 25%. Text messaging was also found to help lower dropout rates for adult learners in England by a third.

White House research uncovered similar results. A 2015 report discovered that low-cost text messages and emails got more kids to enroll and helped college borrowers to manage their student loans better.

“These types of strategies work well with some students and educational settings and not well for others,” Castleman said in an article that appeared in The Hechinger Report. “It’s not texting itself that makes these nudges successful; it’s attending to details like frequency, timing, and framing of messages.”

Too Much Tech Doesn't Help Learning

A study from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that moderate use of technology by students tends to produce better learning outcomes. The research also noted that students who use computers frequently often have much worse learning outcomes.

The report, Students, Computers, and Learning: Making The Connection, evaluated students from 31 countries in areas such as digital skills and comparing reading comprehension between print and digital formats.

Students from Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, and Canada were the top performers in the digital skills assessments. Students from the United States and Canada performed better in digital reading, while those from Poland and Shanghai were stronger in reading print formats.

“School systems need to find more effective ways to integrate technology into teaching and learning to provide educators with learning environments that support 21st-century pedagogies and provide children with the 21st-century skills they need to succeed in tomorrow’s world,” Andreas Schleicher, OECD director for education and skills, said in an article in eSchool news.  “Technology is the only way to dramatically expand access to knowledge. To deliver on the promises technology holds, countries need to invent more effectively and ensure that teachers are at the forefront of designing and implementing this change.”