Online Courses Connect with Digital Textbooks

Pearson Education and netLibrary recently announced a plan to create digital versions of college-level textbooks based on hundreds of the most popular titles. Limited feature versions of these digital textbooks will also be integrated with products offered through CourseCompass, Pearson's customized version of Blackboard's e-learning platform.

CourseCompass enables educators to customize extensive Pearson content offerings and integrate them with the educational materials they develop. Educators will be able to manage their courses from a personalized CourseCompass home page. In addition, they can easily upload important Word and Powerpoint course documents by following simple on-screen instructions, and creating links directly to the digital textbooks without having HTML experience.

The collaboration allows Course-Compass instructors to invent more effective approaches to reaching their students online. Because the digital textbooks will always be accessible in CourseCompass, the connection between the online course and the relevant textbook content is a mouse-click away. Resources such as full-text searches, links to relevant Web sites and online glossaries are also easily accessible to students, who will be able to maintain an uninterrupted online learning experience. Pearson Education, New York, NY, (212) 641-2400, www.coursecompass.com.

This article originally appeared in the 12/01/2001 issue of THE Journal.

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