One year with MOOCs, research findings from the first 17 edX classes

Courtesy of: MOOCs.com

Professors from MIT and Harvard report on their first year in MOOCs and the edX project: 

MITx working papers
HarvardX Working Papers

• There were 841,687 registrations from 597,692 unique users
• Only 5 percent earned a certificate of completion.
• One-third of users never viewed any course materials.
• More than half of those who completed at least half of the course went on to earn a certificate of completion

See also:
Education Week article from one of the authors, 

The First Year of edX: Research Findings to Inform Online Learning

Google Book Scanning Project is Fair!

Big success for the Google Book project and the libraries involved in this initiative. Yesterday a judge ruled that the project did not break any fair use regulations and dismissed the lawsuit.

Access full text of the ruling here, thanks to Karen Coyle's blog entry.

The National Digital Public Library is now live

Launched on April 18, 2013 the Digital Public Library of America aims to "make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge" .

This ambitious and long time in the making project (see this post), is discussed at length by Robert Darnton, main leader of the initiative and Professor and University Librarian at Harvard, in this NY Review of Books article.

Ebook Trends in 2013

E book prices continue to fall:

In the past few months, pricing of ebooks and issues of competition are coming into sharper focus. Changes are coming much faster in the publishing world today—prices for titles are dropping and we are seeing the development of new models and channels for publishing, distribution, and sales.

Read full article by N. K. Herther.

Taken from http://goo.gl/D0QAY   

Undergrads and IT - 2012 survey

EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research has released its annual survey of undergraduates' attitude towards technology in Higher Education.

Click on the image for the full infographic.
Read the entire report.

American Publishers and Google reach an agreement

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google announced a settlement agreement that will provide access to publishers' in-copyright books and journals digitized by Google for its Google Library Project. The dismissal of the lawsuit will end seven years of litigation.

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Tablet ownership triples among college students

The Pearson Foundation recently released their second annual survey on Students and Tablets.
Key findings:

• Tablet ownership has more than tripled among college students since March 2011, with one-quarter of students now owning a standard tablet (25%), compared to only 7% in March 2011.
  
•  Ownership of standard tablets among college-bound high school seniors has quadrupled from 4% in March 2011 to 17% in January 2012.
  
• Among college students, one-third (35%) of those who own a standard tablet also own an e-book reader or small tablet device.
  
• Almost one-half of current tablet owners (46%) say that they intend to purchase another tablet within the next six months.

For more information, read the Pearson Foundation Survey on Students and Tablets 2012

Kindle Fire: Amazon's tablet is out!

Amazon announced yesterday the release of the Kindle Fire, its new tablet. It will be available on November 15 at $199.  

Authors sue the HathiTrust

The HathiTrust is an initiative from a variety of academic institutions to 'build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive digital archive of library materials'.

On September 12, the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ), and eight individual authors filed a law suit against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University for copyright infringement. 

This page has the legal documents and various reactions to that lawsuit.

Hacking the Academy

Hacking the Academy, a book crowdsourced in one week

In May 2010 the two authors Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt asked online:

Can an algorithm edit a journal? Can a library exist without books? Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms? Can a conference be held without a program? Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?

They picked the best submissions (over 300 received in one week) and posted the volume online. Click here for more about the methodology. This initiative comes from the University of Michigan Digital Culture project.

Here are some shortcuts to the main chapters:

• Hacking Scholarship
• Hacking Teaching
• Hacking Institutions

From Scroll to Screen

We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all.

Full NYT article

New Digital Partners: Google and the British Library

Per the agreement, 250 000 out-of-copyright titles representing 40 million pages from 1700-1870, from the French Revolution to the end of slavery will be digitized.

Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, The Natural History of the Hippopotamusor River horse. 1775 (2), British Library Board

"Once digitised, these unique items will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the Library’s website and stored in perpetuity within the Library’s digital archive."[Click for full press release]

Consumer attitude towards e-books

BISG (Book Industry Study Group) launched a study on Consumer attitude towards e-books The reports are not free but results have been reported in a variety of places.

Here are some key findings:

• Right now Kindle holds the top spot for devices @ 40% – just passed the PC/laptop in the last survey @39%
• Nearly half (49%) of ereading devices continue to be acquired as a gift from someone else
• Cost of entry is still the top reason people who read ebooks have not switched to a device.
• Among ebook buyer, print is definitely losing ground – nearly 50% of ebook readers now say they are buying exclusively or almost exclusively ebooks/ 49% indicate they either MOSTLY or Exclusively purchase ebooks
• 38% of those indicating first ebook purchase say they started within the last 6 months.
• Half of all ebooks being acquired today are ‘free’ e-books”
• Places where ebooks are downloaded: Amazon still holds the top spot @ 61% – B&N has 20%; Library 7%; Sony 5% ebooks.com; 10% etc.

UC libraries assess E-book project with Springer

University of California Libraries entered into an agreement with Springer in September 2009 to run a 2 year pilot project by purchasing "nearly every Springer ebook published in English and German from 2005 to 2009, including Landolt-Bornstein. The collection includes nearly 20,000 ebooks in the sciences and social sciences. "

Each book chapter is available as a PDF file without digital rights management (DRM). These files can be downloaded, printed, and even transferred to a PDA or Kindle. Eventually, these ebooks will be linked from our campus catalogs as well as from Melvyl, UC-eLinks, and Google Scholar.

UC is running a survey on the project and results will be posted on this page.