Create Customized Course Materials
The Bell & Howell Company announced the debut of
XanEdu, its newest unit of products serving the higher education market. The product’s portfolio offers CoursePacks, CasePacks, LitPacks online, a ReSearch Engine and an MBA ReSearch Engine. The CoursePacks, powered by ProQuest, include pre-selected articles and lecture notes written by leading professors and discipline experts. Professors can utilize the program’s tools to customize their curricula by adding their own notes for students, adding links to a syllabus, homepage or Web site, or including teaching notes. Because they are delivered within one day of adoption and remain in the operating system for two years, CoursePacks are convenient to use. Also, they are cost effective because faculty control prices and students purchase only what they need. In addition, all material is copyright cleared, so awaiting approval is eliminated.
XanEdu CasePacks are instructor-created and provide access to cases from leading case developers, including IVEY, INSEAD, NACRA and Thunderbird. The CasePacks contain customizable commands. The LitPacks offer tools similar to the CousePacks. Using the LitPacks online makes it easy to replace (or use with) paper anthologies, with customized selections of chapters from books, p'ems and plays. The ReSearch Engines are consolidated resources that students may rely on for term papers, presentations and research. The ReSearch Engine provides 12,000 targeted topic trees, which are aligned with course content, while the MBA ReSearch Engine provides 20,000 targeted topic trees selected from thousands of business sources.
Concurrent with XanEdu’s recent launch is its Web site, www.xanedu.com. Sources that help power XanEdu include UMI Publishers, Chadwyck-Healey, Britannica.com, Best of Web and others. XanEdu.com, Ann Arbor, MI, (800) 218-5971, www.xanedu.com.
This article originally appeared in the 10/01/2000 issue of THE Journal.