6 Lessons One Campus Learned About E‑Textbooks

in Amazon Kindle, e-books, Education | June 11th, 2009

A quick heads up: Jeff Young has an infor­ma­tive piece in The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion on what hap­pened when one uni­ver­si­ty deliv­ered all text­books to stu­dents elec­tron­i­cal­ly. It’s def­i­nite­ly worth a read. Mean­while, on a relat­ed note, Walt Moss­berg, the Wall Street Jour­nal’s tech guru, does­n’t like the new Kin­dle DX very much. Ama­zon designed the super­sized e‑book read­er (see it here) to bring porta­bil­i­ty to text­books, news­pa­pers and oth­er peri­od­i­cals. If you get one, let us know your thoughts, whether pro or con.

via Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press on Twit­ter (Find us on Twit­ter here)

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Online Educational Resources in Africa

in Education | June 8th, 2009

Today, Aman­da Coolidge (British Colum­bia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy) joins us and talks about what’s hap­pen­ing with Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resources (OER) in Africa. Down the line, she’ll be blog­ging about OER in oth­er parts of the world as well. Take it away Aman­da.

Over 500,000 Niger­ian teach­ers need teacher train­ing and you can bet this is going to be a chal­lenge. Africa is work­ing toward the UN Mil­len­ni­um goal of free edu­ca­tion for all by 2010. Still, teach­ers and stu­dents across Africa need resources in and out­side of the class­room and, like any­where else in the world, they need resources devel­oped in the con­text of their own envi­ron­ment and cul­ture.

The good news is that one of the world’s most com­pre­hen­sive open edu­ca­tion­al resource repos­i­to­ries in teacher edu­ca­tion is called “TESSA: Teacher Edu­ca­tion in Sub Saha­ran Africa”. TESSA has pro­duced a large bank of mate­ri­als direct­ly aimed at enhanc­ing and improv­ing access to, and the qual­i­ty of, local school-based edu­ca­tion and train­ing for teach­ers. These mate­ri­als (includ­ing audio and oth­er media) are mod­u­lar in for­mat. They focus on class­room prac­tice in the areas of lit­er­a­cy, numer­a­cy, sci­ence, social stud­ies and the arts, and life skills. All the mate­ri­als are avail­able through this web­site in a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent for­mats and in 5 dif­fer­ent lan­guages.

Since TESSA was launched in June 2008, the response from the Open Resource com­mu­ni­ty glob­al­ly has been grat­i­fy­ing­ly pos­i­tive.

“The TESSA mate­ri­als are eas­i­ly locat­ed in the envi­ron­ment around us with­out hav­ing to trav­el long dis­tances at high cost”
Teacher, Tan­za­nia

“per­haps the most suc­cess­ful of all the OER projects we have heard about”
Sir John Daniel, Pres­i­dent and Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer, Com­mon­wealth of Learn­ing

Aman­da Coolidge is cur­rent­ly Edu­ca­tion­al Tech­nol­o­gist at the British Colum­bia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy (BCIT) in Van­cou­ver, BC. She was pre­vi­ous­ly with the Open Uni­ver­si­ty UK and BBC based in Kenya.

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Is The College Bubble Next?

in Current Affairs, Education | June 1st, 2009

From The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion:

Is it pos­si­ble that high­er edu­ca­tion might be the next bub­ble to burst? Some ear­ly warn­ings sug­gest that it could be.

With tuitions, fees, and room and board at dozens of col­leges now reach­ing $50,000 a year, the abil­i­ty to sus­tain pri­vate high­er edu­ca­tion for all but the very well-heeled is ques­tion­able. Accord­ing to the Nation­al Cen­ter for Pub­lic Pol­i­cy and High­er Edu­ca­tion, over the past 25 years, aver­age col­lege tuition and fees have risen by 440 per­cent — more than four times the rate of infla­tion and almost twice the rate of med­ical care. Patrick M. Callan, the cen­ter’s pres­i­dent, has warned that low-income stu­dents will find col­lege unaf­ford­able.

Mean­while, the mid­dle class, which has paid for high­er edu­ca­tion in the past main­ly by tak­ing out loans, may now be pre­clud­ed from doing so as the pri­vate stu­dent-loan mar­ket has all but dried up. In addi­tion, endow­ment cush­ions that allowed col­leges to engage in steep tuition dis­count­ing are gone. Declines in hous­ing val­u­a­tions are mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for fam­i­lies to rely on home-equi­ty loans for col­lege financ­ing. Even when the equi­ty is there, par­ents are reluc­tant to fur­ther lever­age them­selves into a future where job secu­ri­ty is uncer­tain.

Is this more doom and gloom­ing? Or is this some­thing to wor­ry about? Your thoughts?
via Andrew Sul­li­van’s Dai­ly Dish

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