<p>Textbook prices have soared over the years, with several studies revealing many university students are finding it difficult to afford textbooks. Fortunately, two innovations – open educational resources (OER) and open textbooks – hold the potential to increase textbook affordability. Experts, though, have stated the obvious: that students can save money through open textbooks only if teachers are willing to develop and use them. Considering both the high price of textbooks and the benefits offered by OER and open textbooks, the aim of this study was to assess the University of the South Pacific (USP) teachers’ willingness towards development of custom-built OER derived open textbooks for their courses with a focus on providing a foundation for strategies to promote open textbook development at USP. This paper reports the findings of an online survey of 39 USP teachers. The results show that 17 teachers were willing to develop OER derived custom-built open textbooks for their courses. Besides this, there are findings relating to six important areas: teachers’ motivation to develop open textbooks; the frequency of more than one prescribed textbook per course; teachers’ awareness of the costs of the prescribed textbooks; the average cost of prescribed textbooks in a course; teachers’ awareness and utilization of OER and open textbooks; and teachers’ perceived barriers to using OER and types of challenges they encounter while using OER. These findings have been discussed in relation to research studies on OER and open textbooks.</p>

In the last few years, open textbook development has picked up dramatically due both to the expense of commercially published textbooks and the increasing availability of high-quality OER alternatives. While this offers a tremendous benefit in terms of lowering student textbook costs, the question remains, to what extent (if any) do open textbooks influence the amount and method in which students engage with their open textbooks. The answers to these questions should provide useful new insights for all involved in open textbooks and aid in their continued development and propagation. Despite seeming difficulty in gathering data to answer these questions, the digital nature of open textbooks, makes it possible to enable a learning analytics system for open textbooks to track how exactly students are interacting with their open textbooks. To date learning analytics for open textbooks has received relatively little attention.To this end, this paper proposes a framework that can act as a useful guide for setting up learning analytics system for open textbooks also applicable to other digital textbooks. The paper concludes by outlining directions for future work.

Textbook prices have been soaring at an unprecedented pace for the last four decades with no signs that this trend will end anytime soon. Several studies have suggested that a solution to this problem comes in the form of open textbooks. As a result, the growth of open textbooks is rapid and sustained. However, though the advent of open textbooks is encouraging, whether, how, and to what extent students are using their open textbooks remains unclear. Learning analytics for open textbooks can provide answers to these questions plus many others, and thereby offers the potential for improving planning, development, monitoring, evaluation and revision of open textbooks. Learning analytics applied to open textbooks has received little attention to date. This on the horizon paper presents and describes developmental work of a method to collect data produced as a result of students’ online and offline interactions with their open textbooks, the first part of a three-step process of learning analytics (the remaining two being data processing and reporting functionalities). The paper concludes with a presentation of future work, in line with the nature of this paper, which is work-in-progress towards developing learning analytics system for open textbooks.

Textbook costs have skyrocketed in recent years, putting them beyond the reach of many students, but Learning analytics offers a faster and more objective means of data collection and processing than traditional counterparts, such as surveys and questionnaires, and-most importantly-with their capability to provide direct evidence of learning, they present the opportunity to enhance both learner performance and environment. With such benefits on offer, it is hardly surprising that the optimism surrounding learning analytics is mounting. However, in practice, it has been pointed out that the technology to deliver its potential is still very much in its infancy, which is true in the case of open textbooks. Against this background, the main aim of our study was to develop a prototype open textbook learning analytics system to track individual learners' online and offline interactions with their open textbooks in electronic publication (EPUB) format, and to present its developmental work as building blocks for future development in this area. We conclude with a discussion of the practical implications of our work and present directions for future work.

Teleconsultation among doctors using a telemedicine system typically involves dealing with and sharing medical images of the patients. This paper describes a software tool written in Java which enables the participating doctors to view medical images such as blood slides, X-Ray, USG, ECG etc. online and even allows them to mark and/or zoom specific areas. It is a multi-party secure image communication system tool that can be used by doctors and medical consultants over the Internet.