Digital Textbooks, Online Learning and the Future of Educational Publishing

9:35 to 10:25 a.m.
Megabyte

Many educational publishers and developers have been pioneers of sorts – having struck out into the new frontier of e-text books, digital resources for both educators and students, and globally connected online learning environments. What kinds of results have we seen from the early experiments in this field? How are students and educators adapting to digital learning/teaching ecosystems? Should we add enhanced media? If so, how much? Should we embed media or link to it online? Should we allow students easy access to the web and online excursions or try to capture their attention in a closed environment? Is learning with tablets more shallow and scattered? If so should we develop digital textbooks to be more fragmental? Should e-textbooks be outside or inside the LMS as learning objects? What are benefits of open platforms vs proprietary?

In this session, moderator Sheila Bounford speaks with online education platform providers, to look at how digital (higher ed) efforts seem to be taking — or not — with students and faculty. And, what the implications are for educational publishers, as well as trade publishers who are looking at the digital educational market as a new potential revenue channel.

Speakers

Michael Cairns, SharedBook
William Chesser, VitalSource Technologies, an Ingram company
Amir Winer, Open University of Israel
Moderated by Sheila Bounford