Dive Brief:
- Instructors at many institutions are utilizing Flipboard, a make-your-own-magazine tool, as a way to engage students while offering up-to-date course materials.
- Campus Technology reports that Flipboard has become popular for instructors whose course materials cover current affairs and business topics, and a journalism instructor at Long Island University Brooklyn is using it to give students insight into the editing and publishing world.
- Some faculty are finding the experience with Flipboard ends up helping students in their careers, giving them a way to curate content relevant to the company or specific projects.
Dive Insight:
Few faculty members teach courses that can feature the same textbook year after year. Finding new educational resources to engage students is a challenge that never goes away. With increased attention on the cost of higher education beyond tuition, including textbooks, many colleges and universities are pushing the adoption of low-cost, or no-cost, options, sometimes for entire degree programs. While studies have found open educational resources are not necessarily harder to find than traditional course materials, they also take significant time and for many faculty members, they are relatively unknown.
Similar to the power faculty have found with Flipboard, Penn State researchers are piloting a tool that lets faculty and students create their own textbooks by searching for content using keywords and editing from there.