Florida State College at Jacksonville starts new etextbook initiative

From a press release I received:

Traditional textbooks routinely cost $100 or more, adding significant cost to a student’s total educational expenses. To address the problem, faculty teams at Florida State College at Jacksonville have written 20 general education textbooks from the ground up. The CaféScribe platform will make it easy for any student at any school to purchase them.

“Florida State College at Jacksonville is applying the latest research on teaching, learning and motivation in every phase of textbook and course development,” said Dr. Jack Chambers, chief operating officer for Florida State College at Jacksonville’s SIRIUS® course development project. “The CaféScribe platform offers students highly interactive capabilities they lack with traditional textbooks, other digital textbooks or e-readers, making it a great foundation for further improving the learning experience. Follett has been a strategic and responsive partner for distribution of our content.” SIRIUS is an initiative to develop highly affordable, highly interactive courses, including digital textbooks, as well as interactive faculty development programs for Florida State College at Jacksonville and beyond. Students do not have to purchase any additional hardware; instead they can download the free CaféScribe e-reader to their laptop, netbook, Mac or PC and then access the SIRIUS digital textbooks directly from their computer.

With the CaféScribe application, students can highlight passages, search on any word in the text, take margin notes, and share notes with professors and peers. In addition, CaféScribe has unique social networking tools tailored to support collaborative learning. These tools expand the boundaries of a student’s learning environment and also help build communities of learners. Students using a common textbook title can easily network, discuss and share notes not only with students enrolled in their own course, but with those using that title at other campuses, schools, and even across the globe.

“The digital textbook market is maturing fast,” said Chambers. “Now that we see what digital textbooks can do, we are asking ourselves what we would like them to do.”