Penn State joining Open Textbook Network to support affordable course content; Penn State News, 1/31/17

Penn State News; 

Penn State joining Open Textbook Network to support affordable course content

"Penn State University Libraries is joining the Open Textbook Network to help support Penn State faculty’s use of and students’ availability to free, openly licensed academic course content.

“Penn State’s membership in the Open Textbook Network supports faculty and students’ access to a large volume of free, openly licensed course content, available online, to help reduce students’ overall cost of attendance,” Joe Salem, the University Libraries’ associate dean for Learning, Undergraduate Services, and Commonwealth Campus Libraries, said. “Joining the Open Textbook Network was one of the recommendations of the University’s Open Educational Resources Task Force as part of a multi-faceted approach to supporting open and affordable course content throughout the curriculum.”

The Open Textbook Network (OTN) helps support colleges and universities’ instructional use of open textbooks and practices. Its Open Textbook Library is the premiere resource for peer-reviewed academic textbooks, all of which are free, openly licensed and complete, according to its website...

Penn State is among the largest universities to join OTN, which was established in fall 2015, and an early supporter among its peer institutions. Other Big Ten Academic Alliance members participating in OTN include the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Ohio State, Purdue, Rutgers, and the Milwaukee and Stout campuses of the University of Wisconsin system."

Are MOOCs Forever?; Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/14/16

[Podcast and Transcript] Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education; Are MOOCs Forever? :

"Think back to the early days of MOOCs. Professors at Stanford and Harvard and other places were suddenly teaching really big classes, free. Hundreds of thousands of students at once were in those courses. It was an unprecedented giveaway of what had traditionally been the most expensive education in the world.

Back then, I met several students who were binging on the courses the way you might binge-watch a season of your favorite show on Netflix. They took as many courses as they possibly could, powering through and finishing as many as 30 courses in a year. When I asked why they were in such a hurry, the most popular reason was that they thought it was all too good to last. As one of those binging students told me, "I’m just afraid this whole thing might end soon." Surely, universities would change their mind about this, or the start-ups working with colleges might lock things up.

Fast forward to last month, when Coursera did something that stirred up all of those concerns again. On June 30 the company deleted hundreds of its earliest courses, as part of a shift to a new software platform. Reaction, as you might expect, was negative on social media and blogs. One programmer called it cultural vandalism...

Hello, and welcome to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Re:Learning Podcast. I’m Jeff Young, and I recently had the chance to talk with Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, about those issues."