ProQuest SIPX Recognized as a Way to Reduce Adoption Barriers to OER Content
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA, January 7, 2016 – ProQuest SIPX is paving the way for higher education institutions and campus leaders to reduce students’ cost of education by leveraging increased use of open educational resources (OER) as part of the SIPX® complete course materials solution.
ProQuest SIPX has generated more than $3.6million to date in savings for students and schools across the US. A recent article from information industry analyst Outsell notes that SIPX helps to solve the problem of lower student outcomes because of prohibitively expensive curriculum resources. SIPX serves a growing need and role as Outsell points out “the increasing willingness of institutions to invest time and energy in compiling OER repositories, and to share courses they have created which use OER materials.”
Access to OER is ever more critical for institutions and SIPX not only makes it easy for instructors to understand the costs of their selected course readings, but also surfaces OER and library-subscribed resources that are free for students deeper into instructor workflows and platforms such as their native campus Learning Management Systems and bookstore coursepacks, making it easier to connect and adopt these resources.
“The viral effect is likely to kick in as this process continues, since it reduces the barriers to using OERs,” says Outsell. “If it no longer takes more time to find OERs than it does to select a textbook, and if offering free resources has proven benefits to course completion rates, then the OER argument looks increasingly persuasive”.
“A primary goal of SIPX when we built this solution was to combat the rising costs of education by making it easier for schools and teachers to create effective learning experiences with the high quality content they want to use, and reduce costs for students,” said Franny Lee (Co-Founder and General Manager of ProQuest SIPX). “We feel that bridging easier access to relevant, quality Open Educational Resources is a key factor in helping solve these cost problems being faced by higher education institutions and students.”
About ProQuest SIPX (http://www.sipx.com)
A growing leader in digital content and online education, ProQuest SIPX provides proven cost-saving and scalable technology solutions to manage and share course materials under the SIPX® and ProQuest® brands. Developed from a Stanford University research project, the system draws together open access and OER materials, comprehensive publisher content and library holdings into an intuitive web interface that allows faculty or support staff to set up and share course readings with students.
ProQuest SIPX's unique technology makes access to course materials cost-efficient, easy and transparent, including recognizing individual user contexts that permit free or reduced cost access because of factors like library subscription affiliations or a student's geography. The solution supports many use cases, including seamless integrations with Learning Management Systems, library course reserves services, bookstores and copyshops, coursepacks, distance education, continuing studies and global open online courses/MOOCs.
Students and schools have saved more than $3.67M to date using the ProQuest SIPX solutions. Reported results based on comparison to traditional coursepacks: average savings of 20-35 percent for students on course materials, over 50 percent savings for library reserves and institution-pay permissions budgets, increased productivity and more visibility in LMS/teaching environments for campus curriculum services to support more courses, copyright-compliance for the university, and flexibility to support a wide range of faculty's preferred teaching platforms. Valuable analytics insights are also created for instructors and libraries on student engagement and campus course material needs, as well as new opportunities for sharing school- and instructor-owned content.
About ProQuest (http://www.proquest.com)
ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company’s products are a gateway to the world’s knowledge including dissertations, governmental and cultural archives, news, historical collections and ebooks. ProQuest technologies serve users across the critical points in research, helping them discover, access, share, create and manage information.
The company’s cloud-based technologies offer flexible solutions for librarians, students and researchers through the ProQuest®, Bowker®, Coutts® information services, Dialog®, ebrary®, EBL™, and SIPX® businesses – and notable research tools such as the Summon® discovery service, the RefWorks® citation and reference management platform, MyiLibrary® ebook platform, the Pivot® research development tool and Intota™. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.