A licensing agreement between the publisher Cengage Learning and the e-textbook vendor Kno has gone sour. Details recently surfaced of a legal battle between the two companies over the publisher’s effort to terminate a contract to digitize its printed textbooks. Cengage accused Kno of copyright infringement, and now the start-up is suing the publisher for damages and the right to continue selling its partner’s e-textbooks.
In early January, Kno sued Cengage for trying to terminate its agreement to let Kno digitize and sell the publisher’s textbooks. News of the lawsuit was first reported last week by the social-networking news site Mashable. The case highlights potential problems that could arise as publishers work with third parties to create interactive textbooks.
The conflict began last August, when Kno introduced new features to its e-reader platform. One of those tools, …
Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council said it would require that the published results of all research it helps pay for be made publicly accessible in institutional repositories within 12 months of publication. The policy, which is to take effect in July, puts the council in line with other major supporters of scientific research, including the National Institutes of Health and Britain’s Wellcome Trust.
“The next steps will be improving public and other researchers’ access to publicly funded data,” Warwick Anderson, the council’s chief executive officer, wrote in a blog post announcing the policy. “In this second decade of the 21st century, those who pay for research through their taxes or through donations increasingly expect to be able to access what they have paid for. This expectation will only grow.”
Apple’s recent release of free software to build e-textbooks has brought attention to custom publishing of academic materials. But Apple’s software, called iBooks Author, lacks easy tools for multiple authors to collaborate on a joint textbook project. Since most books aren’t written in isolation, two new publishing platforms seek to make that group collaboration easier.
The first, Booktype, is free and open-source. Once the platform is installed on a Web server, teams of authors can work together in their browsers to write sections of books and chat with each other in real time about revisions. Entire chapters can be imported and moved around by dragging and dropping. The finished product can be published in minutes on e-readers and tablets, or exported for on-demand printing. Booktype also comes with community features that let authors create profiles, join groups, and track…
The Association of American University Presses does not support the proposed Research Works Act, the group said in a statement released Tuesday. But it also does not support an opposing bill, the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would require public access to the results of federally financed research no later than six months after publication. The other bill would prevent federal agencies from imposing such mandates.
Both bills would “short circuit the process of creating appropriate and sustainable public access policy currently being undertaken by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, as mandated by current law, the America COMPETES Act,” the group said. “AAUP supports the COMPETES process, and is hopeful that a better and more informed policy will result that will help to best disseminate the fruits of publicly funded research.”
Your text messages may be worth more than you think. They could help advance the understanding of just how language changes—or at least that’s the theory behind Text4Science, a global project to gather 100,000 donated texts. Linguistic researchers from three Canadian institutions—the universities of Montreal and Ottawa, and Simon Fraser University—are collaborating to build a database that will depend on the public sending old texts to the project’s Web site.
The Canadian researchers hope to dispel the theory that texters “r” lazy and fully expect to find that texters are instead creative, literate people who have found imaginative ways to use the medium. They dismiss the idea that people sending text messages are illiterate.
“When they talk to their friends, they speak differently than if they were to speak to [Canadian Prime Minister] Stephen Harper or the queen or to a…
Many colleges look to online education as the path to growth, but it is often a bumpy road. At the Higher Ed Tech summit in January, a dean from the University of Southern California told me how she avoided the potholes. Karen Gallagher, dean of the university’s Rossier School of Education, took her school’s master’s degree in teaching online with the help of 2tor, a company that builds digital teaching platforms for traditional universities. “It’s our degree,” she says, “and our faculty.” That faculty had to learn a new way to teach for online students, however, and 2tor helped with that, as well as recruiting and placing students in teacher-training positions. The company had to learn that “we are not the Wild West and we have rules,” Ms. Gallagher says. But the partnership is a…
Improving college retention and graduation rates are tops in the nation’s higher-ed “to do” list. At the Higher Ed Tech summit in January, high-school and college transcripts were touted as unexpected keys to these goals. Matthew Pittinsky, chief executive of Parchment, a digital transcript company, and a founder of Blackboard, points out that transcripts capture the strengths of relationships between particular high schools and colleges because, taken together, they record the numbers of shared students. They reveal where students applied and where they got in, and what courses successful students had in common.
Want to learn the basics of what goes inside your smartphone and computer?
You can get a better grasp of that gadgetry in a free online course announced today by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—the first class to open in the institute’s closely watched new interactive online learning venture, MITx. And if you pass the course, MIT will award you a certificate for free.
The prototype class, “6.002x: Circuits and Electronics,” opens for enrollment today (sign up here). The course will run from March 5 to June 8. Modeled on an introductory class typically offered to between 100 and 250 undergraduates on campus, the course will help students make the transition from physics to electrical engineering and computer science. Teaching it will be Anant Agarwal and Chris Terman, co-directors of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Piotr Mitros, a…
The market for free online courses is growing every week, with new companies emerging to offer open courses to anyone who wants them. Some of them have forgone the support of traditional institutions to try the for-profit waters instead. For anyone who might be struggling to keep track of the ever-growing field—the companies’ names can sound similar or stretch the bounds of the dictionary—below are four recently created start-ups challenging the traditional degree model with their free online courses:
Udacity: The free education platform that grew out of Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun’s huge artificial-intelligence course has its own plans to expand. When Udacity appeared a few weeks ago, two courses—one on building a search engine and the other on programming a robotic car—were in the works. They start on February 20 and will last seven weeks. And now, Udacity’s Web …
At the 2012 Higher Ed Tech Summit in Las Vegas, I talked with the chief executive of the e-textbook giant CourseSmart, Sean Devine, about making digital materials easier for professors to use. The company distributes digital versions of 30,000 texts—from Pearson, Cengage, Wiley, and others—across 7,000 campuses. New versions will allow professors, within a learning-management system, to annotate book pages for students, and link pages of the book to other course elements using a drag-and-drop system. Mr. Devine also talks about his new deal to expand access within fast-growing Western Governors University.
Developing online and blended learning programs requires research and collaboration. Learn how top technology companies are partnering with campuses across the country to advance online learning as it becomes an increasingly important aspect of higher education.
A licensing agreement between the publisher Cengage Learning and the e-textbook vendor Kno has gone sour. Details recently surfaced of a legal battle between the two companies over the publisher’s effort to terminate a contract to digitize its printed textbooks. Cengage accused Kno of copyright infringement, and now the start-up is suing the publisher for damages and the right to continue selling its partner’s e-textbooks.
Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council said it would 
Apple’s recent release of free software to build e-textbooks has brought attention to custom publishing of academic materials. But Apple’s software, called iBooks Author, lacks easy tools for multiple authors to collaborate on a joint textbook project. Since most books aren’t written in isolation, two new publishing platforms seek to make that group collaboration easier.
Your text messages may be worth more than you think. They could help advance the understanding of just how language changes—or at least that’s the theory behind Text4Science, a global project to gather 100,000 donated texts. Linguistic researchers from three Canadian institutions—the universities of Montreal and Ottawa, and Simon Fraser University—are collaborating to build a database that will depend on the public sending old texts to the project’s 
The market for free online courses is growing every week, with new companies emerging to offer open courses to anyone who wants them. Some of them have forgone the support of traditional institutions to try the for-profit waters instead. For anyone who might be struggling to keep track of the ever-growing field—the companies’ names can sound similar or stretch the bounds of the dictionary—below are four recently created start-ups challenging the traditional degree model with their free online courses:
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Developing online and blended learning programs requires research and collaboration. Learn how top technology companies are partnering with campuses across the country to advance online learning as it becomes an increasingly important aspect of higher education.