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April 6, 2017
Raleigh, N.C. (April 6, 2017) – Open educational resources (OER) have gained popularity over the past decade to provide students with affordable course materials that are easily customizable to meet the needs of individual instructors. However, these learning materials are often lacking in key attributes such as reliable distribution, easy integration and detailed analytics that are common to the more established types of course materials.
To bridge the gap between OER and traditional learning materials, the California State University (CSU) system and VitalSource Technologies LLC® today announced a collaboration designed to increase the adoption and use of OER.
“This collaboration is directly in line with our mission to help the creation and delivery of affordable, high quality course materials. Professors and instructors are investing a great amount of time and energy into creating OER,” said Mike Hale, VitalSource’s VP of Education for North America. “This new arrangement gives this quality OER content the same discoverability, ease of use, market reach, and dependable platform more than 1,000 commercial publishers rely on with VitalSource Bookshelf®.”
Educators and institutions interested in adopting existing academic and workforce development OER managed by the California State University within their MERLOT, SkillsCommons and COOL4Ed projects will now be able to offer the content available to faculty and students through the VitalSource Bookshelf platform. Educators and institutions also wishing to create and/or revise OER content can use VitalSource Content Studio™, VitalSource’s proprietary digital-first authoring tool, developed to provide content creators an intuitive tool to create standards-based, responsive, interactive and accessible content. The EPUB 3 content created in VitalSource Content Studio can then be delivered to students via Bookshelf.
“The collaboration with VitalSource will enable the convenient, accessible, scalable, sustainable and measurable use of OER by individuals and institutions,” said Gerry Hanley, CSU’s Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Technology Services and Executive Director of MERLOT. “Together, we will have a digital marketplace that provides educators and learners the greatest choice of affordable educational content available together with a convenient and dependable distribution service.”
VitalSource and CSU announced this new collaboration yesterday at the Online Learning Consortium (OLC)/MERLOT INNOVATE Conference in New Orleans. The INNOVATE conference provides the education community an opportunity to foster organic interactions and collaborative cross-disciplinary problem solving by participating in a series of engaging hands-on workshops. Together, the OLC/MERLOT INNOVATE community builds new foundations for stronger and better higher education environments.
About VitalSource |www.vitalsource.com VitalSource Technologies LLC, part of Ingram Content Group LLC, is improving the learning experience by making it easier to create and deliver effective and affordable content. The preferred choice among educational institutions and companies for digital learning materials, VitalSource® helps over 1,000 educational content providers create and deliver seamless interactive learning experiences through its exclusive Bookshelf® platform to millions of learners at 7,000 institutions. Bookshelf users opened more than 20 million digital textbooks last year and read more than 2.4 billion pages. Follow VitalSource on Twitter at @VitalSource.
About California State University |www.calstate.edu The California State University is the largest system of senior higher education in the country, with 23 campuses, 50,800 faculty and staff and 479,000 students. Half of the CSU's students transfer from California Community Colleges. Created in 1960, the mission of the CSU is to provide high-quality, affordable education to meet the ever changing needs of California. With its commitment to quality, opportunity, and student success, the CSU is renowned for superb teaching, innovative research and for producing job-ready graduates. Each year, the CSU awards more than 110,000 degrees. One in every 20 Americans holding a college degree is a graduate of the CSU and our alumni are 3 million strong. Connect with and learn more about the CSU at the CSU Media Center.
