Florida State College at Jacksonville faculty have created 20 electronic textbooks that are accessible on a free online platform that lets students take notes in the margins, search for key terms, and share notes with peers and professors through an interactive social-networking feature.
Students don’t need to buy any additional hardware to use the college’s eBook program, officials said. Instead, they simply download an eReader application called CafeScribe, which also brings students together through social networking to form online study groups.
And students who use the CafeScribe eBooks aren’t limited to contact with their professors and fellow students. Any student from any campus in the world can share content and study notes with any other student if they’re using the same web-based textbook, according to an April 21 announcement from Follett Higher Education Group, the Illinois-based used book supplier that makes CafeScribe.
CafeScribe’s Digital Textbook Store has a wide range of marked-down books, along with lists of “others reading this book” and students “adding notes to this book” at the bottom of the web page. Visitors can click on the names of students reading the book to see which other digital books they’ve bought from the CafeScribe marketplace.
Read the full story at eCampus News.
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