Interactive Online Assignments for Collaborative Statistics textbook adopters

Connexions Consortium member, WebAssign, is offering online support for open textbooks, including Collaborative Statistics, available on Connexions. Faculty adopting open textbooks no longer have to forgo the rich online homework and assignment tools offered with expensive college textbooks. Students save by using a free and open textbook and a low cost homework system, and faculty get the support they need in the classroom.

For Collaborative Statistics, WebAssign offers many homework problems from the text, labs from representative chapters, and lecture videos. Homework problems are linked to the appropriate chapters in the book, if students need help.

Connexions open licensing is designed to encourage value-added services to support open materials, so we are very excited to see WebAssign's offering for Collaborative Statistics. This is the beginning of an ecosystem involving educators, learners, and entrepreneurs to support and enrich open education resources.

The following links provide more information about this new service.

• WebAssign's press release
• Collaborative Statistics package at WebAssign
• Collaborative Statistics online at Connexions
  
• WebAssign's lens at Connexions

Community College Textbooks for your Mobile Reader

For the last week, we have been blogging about our new mobile versions of Connexions' textbooks. For those of you teaching or learning in community colleges, the following links will provide you direct access to the mobile textbooks in the Community College Open Textbook Collaborative lens in Connexions. (The repository has many more collections and textbooks, but these will be of particular interest to community college faculty and learners, because they have been vetted and reviewed.)

Mobile books suggested by the Community College Open Textbook Collaborative:

• Collaborative Statistics by Barbara Illowsky and Susan Dean
  
  
• Concept Development Studies in Chemistry, by John S. Hutchinson


• Elementary Algebra, by Wade Ellis and Denny Burzynski|
  
  
• AP Environmental Science by University of California College Prep (UCCP)


• A First Course in Electrical and Computer Engineering, by Louis Scharf


• Fundamentals of Mathematics, by Denny Burzynski and Wade Ellis epub


• Project Management for Scientists and Engineers by Merrie Barron and Andrew R. Barron


• Three Modules on Clear Writing Style: An Introduction to The Craft of Argument, by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory Colomb

You can also go to a textbook online and then download the EPUB from there. For more help, click here.


If you would like to read any of these books online rather than downloading the mobile version, you can click on them from the Community College Open Textbook Collaborative lens.

Connexions and enTourage eDGe

Connexions Consortium member enTourage, shows off Connexions mobile textbooks on their dualbook (e-reader, tablet) eDGe.

When content relies on interactive features that eReaders don't yet commonly support, our EPUBs have links that go from the ebook to the content online. That makes a dual screen reader like the enTourage eDGe (pictured here and below) perfect for interactive Connexions content: open the EPUB on one side, and the website on the second screen.

The enTourage eDGe allows users to take and save their notes, just like they can in a printed textbook. But these are much easier on the shoulders than a pack of heavy books!

We have instructions for how to download and view Connexions EPUBs on the eDGE (as well as several other e-readers) here.

Connexions is going mobile!

"More and more students are accessing educational materials on phones and e-readers," said Joel Thierstein, executive director of Connexions. "The mobile device is, in many cases, the primary access point for educational content in the developing world."

Which is why Connexions has spent the summer making our content available in EPUB format, the current standard for most mobile devices and e-readers, including Apple's iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, Google's Android, Barnes and Noble's Nook, the Kobo eReader, the enTourage's eDGe, and more.

Just think about the possibilities! No longer are you tied to your computer, reading modules online or in PDF format. No longer are you forced to carry around printouts of your materials. Instead you can access Connexions materials at any time, any place.

We have detailed instructions for how to download and view Connexions EPUBs here.

Check out this story about our EPUB rollouts.

Please vote for Connexions talk at the Plone Conference

Connexions is attending the upcoming Plone Conference in Bristol, UK, October 25th to the 31st and we have proposed a high level talk about Connexion and about the software that runs Connexions, Rhaptos. We need your vote so the talk gets chosen. The Plone conference and talk are part of the Connexions Consortium strategy for broadening community and technical support for Connexions and the Connexions software called Rhaptos. The Plone conference, set in Bristol UK, is also a chance to engage the international community even more with Connexions.

Please vote for the Connexions talk, "Connexions and Enterprise Rhaptos -- A Global Education and Plone Success Story", using this link to vote. (You will need to scroll down to our talk and click to vote.)

Two of the Connexions Consortium members (Shuttleworth and Upfront Systems) are also proposing talks and they will be quite interesting. Mark Horner from the Shuttleworth Siyavula project will talk about FullMarks, an open assessment bank for teachers and students. Roché Compaan from Upfront Systems will talk about tuning Plone for speed.

Each of the talks is listed below. Please vote for us. (Link to vote)

1. Connexions: "Connexions and Enterprise Rhaptos -- A Global Education and Plone Success Story"


2. Upfront Systems: "Lose weight now, ask me how!"


3. Mark Horner: "FullMarks for Plone :)"