I posted Audrey Waters 2012 Trends article on MOOCs a while ago – here another one.
Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: The Battle to Open Textbooks
“..despite all the hype about “revolutionizing” the textbook, faculty and students are still slow to adopt digital versions.”
“The proprietary publishers added all sorts of bells and whistles to their textbooks this year — high resolution images, embedded YouTube videos, analytics so you can track how much your students have read, deals with schools that bundle the costs in with tuition fees, and so on. (Much of the xMOOC trend is quite textbook-like too.) But none of this feels particularly transformative.
The most exciting change in digital textbooks, I would argue, comes with efforts like these hackathons, where teachers and learners are the creators not just the consumers of OER. (At that point, I think the word “textbook” will be entirely the wrong way to describe things. And amen to that, I say.)”