Any online textbook service should focus on an excellent e-reading experience; it should be strong across all devices and ideally allow teachers to put content inside the learning space, whether it be a Learning Management System (LMS), wiki, project space or the like.
You previously told us you wanted to see an improved set of e-Readers and to integrate texts into the places where learning happens: the Learning Management System or other online learning spaces. We’ve been deliberately quiet as we have been working hard to improve the LearningField service with a focus on these two key features.
To deliver these features we have partnered with VitalSource – a dedicated textbook delivery platform with more users world-wide than any other etext service. VitalSource eReaders are used by more than 10 million users across 6,000 campuses world-wide. This partnership means that LearningField are now the only Australian textbook provider that can provide reading options offline, online or through an LMS.
This is allowing us to offer schools the following:
- A powerful online reading experience, with a fully-featured Cloud Reader. Many users may prefer it as their main way of reading texts, as they can read straight from the LearningField catalogue or their LMS, and they can bookmark, highlight and annotate online from any device
- A strong, consistent reading experience across all devices via our eReader apps. We now add a Chromebook eReader to our line up of PC, Mac, iPad and Android eReaders. It allows us to serve BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) schools in a way we or others haven’t been able to before.
- An ability to provide a link in any learning space to the specific page of a text: teachers can share a Cloud Reader page link with their students in any LMS, Wiki, email or blog.
- Learning Management System integration: LearningField content can now be searched, assigned and read directly from leading LMS including Canvas, Schoology, Desire2Learn, Moodle and Blackboard; and coming in 2017 with Schoolbox and Seqta.
Our reception to date from existing customers and the market has been positive. Customers have especially appreciated how easy is to search, assign and read texts within the LMS, and have all their course content in the one place. Our improved Cloud Reader features have also been appreciated.
We love to hear from you if you’d like to learn more. Contact support@learningfield.com.au and we will be sure to respond as soon as possible.