Pearson today announced Project Blue Sky, a cloud-based, content service that provides instructors with easy access to Open Educational Resources (OER). Pearson is partnering with Silicon Valley non-profit Gooru, a search engine for learning materials, and will leverage Gooru’s powerful search capabilities to build applications that seamlessly integrate high-quality learning resources on the web, including OER, with instructor-created and Pearson content. Faculty will also have the ability to publish their customized digital course content within multiple types of learning management systems, including Pearson’sOpenClass and LearningStudio.

With the anticipated beta launch in spring 2013, Project Blue Sky will directly address barriers to adoption of digital material and Open Educational Resources. According to a soon-to-be-released report from Babson Survey Research Group, faculty reported that key challenges to adopting OER include the lack of a single, comprehensive catalog of content, and concerns about too much time spent finding and evaluating the material.

“The creation of Project Blue Sky is an extension of Pearson’s shift to developing innovative services that provide rich and engaging teaching and learning experiences,” said Don Kilburn, Vice Chairman of Pearson Higher Education. “Working closely with an education technology non-profit that is committed to providing access to high quality content for every student, and institutional development partners, we are empowering faculty to have control of the selection of a wide variety of text and rich media assets.”

Pearson is collaborating closely with 13 faculty on Project Blue Sky’s design to provide an optimal experience that lets faculty identify the most relevant and high quality content for their courses. The Project Blue Sky Pilot group is reviewing the content service and building unique multimedia eTextbooks for use in their courses.

“As an educator, I am constantly seeking out effective course materials, and I usually have resources in many places that are easily lost,” said Sarah Strout, Department Coordinator & Assistant Professor of Psychology, Dominican College. “The potential of the Blue Sky platform is enormous because it will give me control over the course materials and save me much time spent frantically searching and vetting OER content on the web. I can pull information from lots of sources and compile all my materials in one spot.”

“Students and faculty are increasingly relying on digital learning resources and would like to spend more time learning rather than sorting through millions of videos and websites for a given topic,” said Dr. Prasad Ram, CEO of Gooru. “The integration of content from Pearson and high-quality web resources from Gooru in a single platform provides immediate access to the most appropriate learning resources for Pearson users.”

Pearson is currently piloting the system with Psychology faculty, and is actively seeking more development partners in other disciplines. For more information on how to become a development partner, visithttp://www.pearsonbluesky.com.

To see a demo of Project Blue Sky, visit the Pearson booth #1423 at EDUCAUSE on Wednesday, November 7th at 6:00 pm in the Exhibit Hall.

Information powerhouse ProQuest is participating in a project that will vastly accelerate research of 15th through 17th Century cultural history. The company will provide access to page images from the veritable Early English Books Online and newcomerEarly European Books to the Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP) at Texas A&M. EMOP will use the content to create a database of typefaces used in the early modern era, train OCR software to read them and then apply crowd-sourcing for editing. The project will turn the rich corpus of works from this pivotal historical period into fully searchable digital documents.

“Digitization of the historical archives of the early modern era made this literature far more accessible. Page images provide scholars with unprecedented access to books that previously could have only been viewed in their source library. However, precision search — the ability to use technology to zero in on very specific text — has been hampered by the fact that OCR technology can’t read the peculiarities of early printing,” said Mary Sauer-Games, ProQuest vice-president, publishing. “We’re thrilled to participate in an effort that we feel will drive new levels of historical discovery. We love the application of modern ingenuity to turn these very old archives into works that are as searchable as text that was born digital.”

ProQuest has played a key worldwide role in preservation and access to early modern history, ensuring the survival of printed works from as early as 1450. In the 1930s, the company became a pioneer of microfiche, when it filmed the contents of the vast archives of the British Library and other major libraries across England — virtually every English language book printed in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. The microfilm collection, ProQuest’s flagship Early English Books, opened these works to global study and created an avenue for preservation. It has since become the quintessential collection for study of the early modern era.

In the 1990s, ProQuest began a massive effort to capture the collection digitally. Early English Books Online enables scholars to manage, share and collaborate on their research virtually. The company even created a social network that allows the scholars who use the collection as a base for their research to connect with each other.

Then, early in the 21st century, ProQuest expanded the program to include major European libraries, launching Early European Books with the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in Italy. Digitization projects are also underway with the U.K.’s famed scientific and medical library — The Wellcome — and the National Library of the Netherlands.

eMop is led by Texas A&M Professors Laura Mandell, Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC), Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna of Computer Science, and Richard Furuta, Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (CSDL), along with Anton DuPlessis and Todd Samuelson, book historians from Cushing Rare Books Library. The scholars earned a two-year, $734,000 development grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the work. ProQuest is one of a variety of participating publishers and software organizations that are collaborating on the project.

EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) has released Humanities Source™, the most comprehensive resource available in the Humanities field. The bibliographic and full-text database was developed from a merger of high-quality databases from EBSCO Publishing and H.W. Wilson, and includes many unique sources that were never previously available. Humanities Source is the first time the entire H.W. Wilson indexing collection of Humanities research literature is available within a single database.

Humanities Source offers an invaluable collection for students, researchers and educators interested in all aspects of the humanities, with worldwide content pertaining to literary, scholarly and creative thought. The extensive collection features full-text for more than 1,480 journals, high-quality indexing and in-depth abstracts for thousands of journals, and indexing for hundreds of thousands of articles, including book reviews.

The millions of records cover subject areas such as archaeology, art, communications, dance, film, folklore, history, journalism, linguistics, literary and social criticism. Coverage also includes classical studies, area studies and gender studies. Humanities Source includes feature articles, interviews, obituaries, bibliographies, original works of fiction, drama and poetry, book reviews, and reviews of ballets, dance programs, motion pictures, musicals, operas, plays, radio and television programs and much more. Additionally, there is a unique subject thesaurus.

Humanities Source is a combination of the A&I and full-text records from the H.W. Wilson databases Humanities Retrospective: 1907-1984™ and Humanities Full Text™. In addition, all of the unique A&I and full-text content from the EBSCO database Humanities International Complete is included, plus an additional 140 full-text titles not available in other EBSCOhost databases.

On the heels of the recent expansion of an e-book pilot program to more than 25 institutions nationwide, McGraw-Hill Education today announced the creation of its Digital Learning Partnership Program, which encourages colleges and universities to transition to digital in ways that promote deeper learning, better pass rates and higher rates of retention. The new program, which builds upon the experience and results from e-book pilots that the company has developed with Indiana University, the University of Minnesota and numerous other institutions, works by enabling institutions across the country to purchase solutions and services at highly affordable rates and in highly customizable ways. The program is launching at this week’s 2012 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Denver and is open to universities now for implementation in fall 2013.

In the new program, instructors at partnering institutions have the option of providing all of their students with McGraw-Hill Education e-books – which contain tools for searching, sharing content, annotating and highlighting – as well as any other McGraw-Hill Education digital solutions they choose to add to the course. These products and services, which improve student performance and instructor effectiveness, include McGraw-Hill Connect (teaching and learning platform), LearnSmart (adaptive study tool), Tegrity Campus (lecture capture) and ALEKS (adaptive math program).

The Digital Learning Partnership Program is designed so that institutions can collaborate with McGraw-Hill Education to customize all aspects of the program, including selecting a preferred e-book vendor, determining the pricing model and setting subscription length, which can now extend far beyond the duration of a course. Likewise, the program is optional at the instructor level to maintain academic freedom, and students who prefer print can order a print-on-demand copy of the e-book.

Because the program is based on partnership and collaboration with participating institutions, McGraw-Hill Education is able to work closely with colleges to provide e-books and digital solutions with the ability to improve student performance at prices that are competitive with rental and used book prices. Additionally, these digital materials are delivered to students through their institution’s LMS and are available from the first day of class or before. No longer do students have to wait for access to course materials – they have all the materials they need to succeed on day one. McGraw-Hill Education’s Digital Learning Partnership Program also includes adaptive learning tools to identify areas of academic strength, remediate areas of weakness and create individualized learning plans that often help students move up a full letter grade in their classes.

“We’re excited to partner with universities across the country to develop custom digital solutions that increase student performance,” said Tom Malek, vice president of Learning Solutions and Services for McGraw-Hill Higher Education. “Finding new ways to make course materials more affordable to students is a core focus of this program, but the ultimate goal is helping universities and students transition to digital in ways that encourage deeper learning, better pass rates and higher rates of retention. Over the last few years, we’ve collaborated on several pilot programs that have enabled us to learn a lot about the digital readiness, preferences and needs of institutions and students. What we have learned in partnership with schools nationwide has definitely helped to shape the Digital Learning Partnership Program.”

From a technology perspective, the Digital Learning Partnership Program integrates with any learning management system through seamless single sign on and is available on any laptop or virtually any mobile device. Institutions have the ability to choose their desired e-book provider, which can include any of McGraw-Hill Education’s e-book partners: CourseSmart, Courseload, and Vital Source.

As universities make the switch from print to digital, higher education institutions have been actively exploring and testing digital product and business models. Results from these pilots and other research indicate that instructors and students are beginning to realize the promise of digital learning materials to improve teaching and learning, Malek notes. According to research from the Indiana University pilot, students were receptive to the digital transition and indicated that their professors’ ability to annotate in their e-books increased the effectiveness of their studying. In another pilot study, 87 percent of students ultimately abandoned paper and choose to read their e-books on digital devices. Studies involving McGraw-Hill Education’s digital learning products have shown that they have the ability to drive measurable improvement in student grades and retention rates.

For more information about the Digital Learning Partnership Program, visit with McGraw-Hill Higher Education and McGraw-Hill Learning Solutions at booth #540 during the 2012 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Denver. McGraw-Hill Education will also be posting live tweets from the conference through its Twitter feeds (@MHEducation, @MHhighered) using the conference hashtag #EDU12.