_____________________________________________________
____________________________________________
All information included in this document is confidential and proprietary to CourseSmart, LLC, and is not to be released
outside the company without prior approval. All information included herein is subject to
change without notice.
CourseSmart Solutions
C
ourseSmart
Solutions
is
a new initiative
that
makes it easier for
educational
institutions
to
connect students and faculty with the digital content they need
.
It
comes from CourseSmart, the
world’s largest provider of
digital
course materials for
North American Higher Education.
CourseSmart Solutions makes it
possible
to integrate a full
range of eTextbook
services
—
from
selecting a textbook for adoption,
finding and buying the right
eText
book to opening up an annotated versio
n of
the day’s
reading
assignment
—
into
your
institution’s overall
web
environment.
The connections to
CourseSmart
content
can
range from e
xplicit
to
invisible, and
interactions can
be fine
-
tuned on a
statewide,
campus
-
by
-
campus,
department
-
by
-
departm
ent, o
r course
-
by
-
course
basis.
Searching, viewing, selecting, purchasing, returning, reading
,
and
personalizing
digital course materials
become
integral
parts of
t
he
on
-
line
educational experience
.
There are
many
technical and organization challenges
to
effectively
incorporating
the offerings of a partner organization
into
a
well
-
established
online environment.
CourseSmart has years of experience addressing these challenges
.
CourseSmart
Solutions
i
s our way of sharing
the solutions we have developed. Cour
seSmart
Solutions offers
a program of easily
-
understood concepts, advanced technology, and
start
-
to
-
finish consulting services that deliver exactly the access to CourseSmart
materials that
suits your institution’s needs.
ETextbooks and Beyond
ETextbooks
are
a
H
igher
E
ducation success stor
y
of the new century.
The
number of
students and instructors taking advantage of on
-
line or downloadable
eTextbooks
has grown exponentially every year.
CourseSmart has
been a pioneer in working
with textbook publishers on
producing and distributing
eTextbooks
. We are
now
the
world’s largest provider of digital
course materials
, with over 1
4
,
000 titles from
leading publishers
such as Cengage Learning, John Wiley & Sons MacMillan,
McGraw
-
Hill Education, and Pearson
.
CourseSmart’s catalog of eTextbooks covers
more than 90% of all demand for core textbooks in North American Higher
Education. Most publishers put
nearly
all of their newly
-
published materials into the
CourseSmart catalog, often before these materials are a
vailable in print.
ETextbooks are succeeding for many reasons:
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
All information included in this
document is confidential and proprietary to CourseSmart, LLC, and is not to be released
outside the company without prior approval. All information included herein is subject to change without notice.
2
Ease of access and use
–
a
CourseSmart
eTextbook is available at any time at
any location
with
an Internet connection. A student
or instructor
can find it,
access
it, and start reading in a
matter of minutes.
Ability to work smarter
–
an eTextbook can be
search
ed
,
highlighted,
and
annotated
.
Faculty and s
tudents can copy
and paste
important information
into their own summaries. Users can print just what they need when they
need it.
Relevanc
e and currency
–
CourseSmart provides the exact edition the
instructor recommends, in the same page format as the printed book
, so
instructors and students can use the eTextbook as an exact substitute for the
print textbook if they choose to
.
C
ampus
-
specif
ic c
ustom editions can be
created, so
students
get
precisely
the
content that the
instructor
plans
to
assign.
Instructors have rapid access to new editions as they become
available.
Cost savings
–
students
and institutions
save an average of 50%
compared t
o
the cost of purchasing new print textbooks.
Institutions using our Faculty
Instant Access program reduce the load on campus mail services by reducing
the handling of heavy examination copies.
Ecology
–
with an eTextbook there is no paper, no ink, no shipp
ing, and no
driving
to the bookstore
.
Academia especially appreciates how “green”
digital content can be.
eTextbooks are a popular and efficient learning tool. As eTextbooks become more
broadly available and more people become aware of their advantages, the
momentum
increases
. Some institutions have begun integrating CourseSmart
materials into the online tools
they provide to students
—
learning management and
registration systems, for example
—
making access to CourseSmart materials easier
and more natural.
Other institutions have taken advantage of the ability to integrate
the entire CourseSmart library into thei
r Faculty Portals, so that Faculty have easy
access to a wide variety of materials.
Now CourseSmart
S
olutions make this kind of
integration available to all
institutions
.
The Integration
Opportunity
Educational institutions
have come to
rely heavily on
web technology. Nearly all
have
bought or built systems for handling on
-
line
class enrollment, grade reporting
,
faculty resources
and campus
news
.
Many
have brought in comprehensive
Learning
Management Systems
(LMS)
and/or Student Information Systems (SIS
)
that
coordinate
a wide
range of administrative and pedagogical tasks.
Incorporating
digital
course
materials
into th
ese online environments is a
n
obvious next step.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
All information included in this
document is confidential and proprietary to CourseSmart, LLC, and is not to be released
outside the company without prior approval. All information included herein is subject to change without notice.
3
CourseSmart has been
listening to its institutional customers when they talk about
how
eTextbooks can fit into automated learning management.
The wish
-
list
includes:
licensing
widely
-
used eTextbooks in bulk and
making it
easy to distribute
them to stu
dent
s
at enrollment time.
providing
student
s
with
immediate access to electronic course materials as
soon as
they
register for the class, no separate payment involved.
avoid
ing
the cumbersome process of accepting
, crediting,
and shipping
returns
of physical media
when students drop course
s.
making
it
mo
re efficient
for faculty to
find and
review
materials
,
communicate their recommendations to students,
and begin teaching
immediately,
without ordering and shipping delays
.
Embedding links in
the
syllabus within the
LMS
at the level of class
schedules and
assigned
in order to take a s
tudent
directly to the
current
assignment
, perhaps with introductory comments from the
instructor
already
attached
incorporating eTextbook citations or page references into social networking
or on
-
line chat systems
The Integ
ration
Challenge
All of this is possible, but there are
hurdles
.
Like any large
-
scale system integration
job, bringing
together
disparate
learning systems is a
challenging
task.
Data and
functionality that might be required to create a meaningful user experience may
exist in several different systems.
Institutional w
eb
sites and the functionality
behind them
have
typically
evolved over time
.
The
ir historical design has made
l
ittle
or no provision for future
integration o
pportunit
ies
.
Older systems, especially
those developed internally, were
probably
intended to be completely stand
-
alone.
With the rise of the Internet,
opportunities
have arisen
for richer and more effective
on
-
li
ne
experience
s,
if these systems
can find ways to interact at a more
-
than
-
superficial level with
each other and with
partners
such as CourseSmart. This
involves
exchanging
data,
maintaining
security,
making sure users are recognized,
conducting financial t
ransactions, and arriving at a
consistent look and feel so that
users don’t feel
disoriented
as they move around.
Achieving t
ight and secure
integration with CourseSmart
,
or any other partner,
involves a number of tasks:
Find
ing
the
natural
points
in the
institution’s systems
where
connection
s can
be made
.
To let CourseSmart
know, f
or example,
that a user is a faculty
member, or
that
a student has enrolled in a class
so that
the appropriate
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
All information included in this
document is confidential and proprietary to CourseSmart, LLC, and is not to be released
outside the company without prior approval. All information included herein is subject to change without notice.
4
eTextbooks
can be put
on his or her virtual bookshelf,
ther
e has to be a
system
-
to
-
system data transfer a
t
the point
in the LMS
or SIS
system
where
the enrollment transaction is
official
.
(
Newer systems that support a
n
integration
-
oriented
‘plug
-
in’ architecture make
this
easier.
)
Determ
in
ing
what
kinds of techni
cal ‘plumbing’
are
required
to
let
the
institution’s
system
s
and CourseSmart
communicate with one another
.
This
means finding the right conduits to
handle
the
array of
programming
-
language
-
specific interfaces, communication protocols,
and
, in newer
systems
, web
-
service interfaces
that are in place.
Aligning
the security requirements of all parties.
Institutional systems will
be
pass
ing
to CourseSmart confidential data
that might include
instructor email
addresses,
student
contact
in
formation, registration
status,
and
academic
credentials. CourseSmart on its side
needs to validate user identities
and rles
so that it can
protect the intellectual property of the publishers it represents
and make sure that only
paid
-
up
students
access their textbooks
and
that
only
authorized
faculty get
free and instant
access to specific eTextbooks.
Going in, each side will have
different mechanisms for
keeping assets secure
and
even different concepts of what security entails.
It is critical to find cross
-
system ways to imple
ment the highest level of
:
o
D
ata
privacy (ensuring that sensitive data can not be accessed by the
wrong party)
o
A
uthentication (knowing that
parties are
who
they
says
they
are
)
o
A
uthorization (allowing only particular users to perform specified
actions
)
o
M
ain
tenance and reporting functions that
support
these topics.
Ensuring a consistent
user experience.
A successful integration
will
be
virtually
invisible to the student, instructor,
or
administrator
using the
integrated
system
.
If
CourseSmart materials appear as part of a
course
instance in the LMS,
for example, it will not be good if the class’s screen
territory responds to
double
-
clicks
in one way
and
the CourseSmart side in
another.
Much behind
-
the
-
scenes work goes into disguisin
g the fact
that
various
functions are coming from different sources
.
(CourseSmart already
does this kind of work making eTextbook
s
from many different publishers
all present themselves to the reader in
a uniform
way.) What’s called for is
an explicit desig
n
step that studies the ‘look’ (skinning), the ‘feel’ (user
interaction conventions), and even the underlying
user
-
int
e
rface
model (e.g.
,
is the user dealing with objects or with actions
?
).
Enabling single sign
-
on. This is the mark of a thorough and sophi
sticated
integration. The idea is to make sure that a user only has to sign on once,
even as he or she crosses the boundary from university web
-
site
to
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
All information included in this
document is confidential and proprietary to CourseSmart, LLC, and is not to be released
outside the company without prior approval. All information included herein is subject to change without notice.
5
CourseSmart and back again. At every point
the user’s
identity
—
and,
therefore, what he
or she
is entitle
d to
—
is known
. Achieving single sign
-
on
requires reviewing the user interface model, finding the one best point spot
to ask the user to log in, and then arranging to securely pass the user’s
“credentials” to the affiliated system
.
For even more convenience
,
additional
information can be exchanged that lets the user interface remember which
book a user had open and what page he or
s
he was on, even
as he or she
switches from a laptop to an iPad.
The CourseSmart Solutions
Approach
CourseSmart
has helped ind
ividual partners accomplish all of these tasks
.
As
interest in deep integration has grown, w
e
have
“package
d
up” our accumulated
solutions
-
set
for enterprise integration
and
backed it up
with personalized, hands
-
on help.
This is CourseSmart Solutions. It p
rovides
a total package of
technology,
people, and a conceptual roadmap for
partners who want to take the next step.
Solving the
h
ard
p
roblems
o
nce
The primary idea behind CourseSmart Solutions is this:
Integrating with
CourseSmart
is not a task that every partner
should have
to figure out
,
individually
,
from the ground up. There is no point to solving the same problem over and over
again.
So CourseSmart has
designed a set of reusable components that
handle the
most fundamental (and
difficult)
pieces of
an integration project. The
se components
are maintained by CourseSmart and stored on CourseSmart servers
in
what we call
the CourseSmart Services
H
ub
. They are available to
any
partner
implementation
that connect
s
into the hub.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
All information included in this
document is confidential and proprietary to CourseSmart, LLC, and is not to be released
outside the company without prior approval. All information included herein is subject to change without notice.
6
Ser
vice
-
o
rient
ation
The
functionality in the
C
ourse
S
mart
Services H
ub is organized as web services
.
Service
-
orientation reflects
industry consensus
on
the best way to exchange
information and deliver functionality over the Internet.
A
web s
ervice is
an
operation
that one system performs at the request of another system and then
delivers the results
over the web
.
Examples of
Services in the C
ourse
S
mart Services
Hub
are
:
ViewBookshelf, ViewETextbook
, LookUpTextbookByISBN,
,
GoToChapter,
etc.
Service
-
orient
ation
has widely
-
recognized advantages:
Services are reusable, often in
different
contexts. More reuse means more
efficiency, lower cost, and greater reliability.
Requests and responses are exchanged over the ubiquitous
, 24
-
7
web
infrastructure
.
W
idely
-
accepted
web
-
services
standards
govern interconnections between
many different consumers and suppliers
The services world has developed a
rchitected interfaces for critical
auxiliary
capabilities
like security, encryption,
and
workflow.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
All information included in this
document is confidential and proprietary to CourseSmart, LLC, and is not to be released
outside the company without prior approval. All information included herein is subject to change without notice.
7
Perhaps most
important: Services are e
asy to understand
and talk about
.
They use
the vocabulary and granularity of the business world, not the
programming world.
Instead of subroutines and
do
-
loops, there are service
calls
with real
-
world meaning, such as those listed
above.
Lightweight
adapters
on the partner side
A
partner
institution
exploits the CourseSmart Service
s
H
ub by
invoking
th
ose
services
that implement
the interactions it wants to offer
, and configuring the
results to mesh with its existing systems
.
The connectors
into the hub
are
lightweight and
tuned to
the i
n
stitution’s
specific needs.
Infrastructure for
connecting
to and from the leading LMS
s
is
already in place.
Connecting a
home
-
grown system
may require some custom configuration
, which CourseS
mart
Solutions can help with or even do for you
.
In any event, the “heavy lifting” is
handled centrally
by CourseSmart, and the work on the partner side is reduced to a
minimum.
Standards
-
c
omplian
ce
The C
ourseSmart
Services H
ub is a good network citizen.
W
e
honor industry
standards at multiple levels
, including:
IT standards for service delivery (W3C/SOA), database interoperability, and
system interconnection
Security standards that enable authentication, single sign
-
on, and federated
identi
t
y
. There ar
e many competing standards, and CourseSmart can help its
partners navigate these alternatives and decide on a best fit.
Education standards
.
CourseSmart
has been an active participant in the IMS
Global Learning Consortium. IMS promotes a number of technol
ogy
-
related
standards for educational innovation. In particular, CourseSmart has been an
early adopter of the Learning Tool Interoperability initiative (LTI), and made
it an essential feature on connection with the CourseSmart hub.
(See
http://www.imsglobal.org/lti/
)
Migration opportunity
Digital standards are relatively new to the education field.
Many
educational
institutions run
proprietary applications
that were
built to
meet
a
specific
set of
needs
in the
most expeditious way
.
But the future clearly lies in alliances,
partnerships, consortia, and
inter
-
campus and
inter
-
institution connections.
Connectivity
requires
standards, and the path from
a one
-
of
-
a
-
kind
proprietary
system
to
a
standards
-
conformant
one
can be disruptive.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
All information included in this
document is confidential and proprietary to CourseSmart, LLC, and is not to be released
outside the company without prior approval. All information included herein is subject to change without notice.
8
Integrating with CourseSmart through CourseSmart Solutions can be an important
step
in this direction.
CourseSmart Solutions is prepared to
start where you are
today,
making the custom connections
you require for the short
-
term while
designing
a
solution that
moves
toward
standards
in manageable steps
.
The
legacy
-
to
-
standards
recipes developed by CourseSmart Solutions may prove useful in
other
integration
projects you
are
contemplating
, and
help you get into
position for
richer
interconnec
t
ivity
overall
.
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