In the post about Texbook Torrents a while back we mentioned an ideal model for textbook distribution and pricing. Publishing firm Flat World Knowledge will follow the same multi-format pricing schedule that we recommended when they launch their textbook line in January 2009. The materials will be offered in several formats, including as free online text, audio, and printed in black and white or color.
According to Stanford’s Computer Science course catalog for the fall, students will have the opportunity to take a course in “iPhone Application Programming.” The class, cs193P, is so far academia’s first response to Apple’s release of the iPhone SDK, which has allowed countless programmers to capitalize on the phone’s success. It’s nice to see a leading university offer a course about a recent piece of consumer technology—hopefully other universities will follow suit. A strong base of college programmers will energize the iPhone application market by introducing a variety of innovative and (likely) free applications.
A poll released today by the Hoover Institution covering perceptions of public institutions shows that most parents are receptive to publicly-funded online learning for high school students.
Kelsey, like many towns scattered throughout
In a new book based on polls conducted by his international polling firm, John Zogby argues that online education will see widespread acceptance in the coming decades. He explained to the Chronicle of Higher Education that online learning is suffering from “cultural lag,” where “those who define the standard [i.e. employers] haven’t caught on yet.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported today that David Parry, assistant professor at the
In a July 30 post on the company blog, Google announced over one million users worldwide are using its online education suite of email, calendar, and docs. As we mentioned before, it is unlikely that Microsoft will be able to match this level of market penetration any time soon, although the battle is far from being won by Google. The real challenge lies in how Google will monetize this user base unaccustomed to commercial services. Nevertheless, this is an important milestone for learning technologies, especially due to the global reach of these services. We expect to see these online platforms continue to experience robust growth, especially as universities in the developing world begin to uncover their potential. With the market growing at such a rapid pace, it is primed for the entrance of a new major player. Will Microsoft or another company occupy this new space? Or will Google simply consolidate its dominance?
After a month of down time, embattled textbook tracker Textbook Torrents is now back online, although still without access to its domain name. The site, which can be reached via its IP address 85.17.226.223, received widespread press coverage at the beginning of July, which brought legal pressure in the form of take-down requests served on its host and domain registrar. The resulting fiasco was typical of the murky legal waters surrounding linking to copyrighted content but not hosting the content itself: the site was booted by its host and, most unusually, locked out of its domain. After scrambling to move to a new hosting service, Textbook Torrents is now back up with heightened privacy measures in place. Most significantly, it no longer records users’ IP addresses to protect user privacy should their server logs be compromised.
The
The July 30 edition of Education Weekly reveals a troubling Obama campaign memo that maligns publicly-funded online learning solutions. The memo reflects an unsophisticated perspective on online education, referring to most online schools as “for-profit” organizations that would squander taxpayer money.
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