by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed
Beginning this month, five major universities — the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, the University of Virginia, Cornell University, and the University of California at Berkeley — will start a pilot program in which certain courses will use only electronic texts. The texts will be available via Courseload, a device-agnostic platform that will integrate with the universities’ learning-management platforms (LMS). If students respond favorably to the pilots at those universities, other members of the consortium might wade in as well, says Dave Lambert, the CEO of Internet2. And as more universities sign on, their negotiating position with publishers stands to improve. The consistency of having e-texts available on a single platform that works with any device and lives inside the LMS could be the catalyst for student acceptance of digital content that campus tech-watchers have been waiting for, says Michael McPherson, the deputy chief information officer at Virginia.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/18/universities-look-get-discounts-e-textbooks-students
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