E-Learning in the 21st Century

Government Intervention and Economics

2007-04-02T15:17:00.000-07:00

To the layman, things would seem to be better off if the government would just keep its hands out of the market. In reality, though, governments can and do intervene in their nation's economies in many ways.

Learn about the impact of such government intervention concepts like price ceiling, price floor, and taxation -- all available for you courtesy of Professor Cram and the College-Cram.com team.

Enjoy!

Accounting Cycle help

2007-04-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

For those accounting students who aren't accounting majors, getting a handle on all the aspects of the accounting cycle can mean the difference between passing and failing. Luckily, help is available for you at www.College-Cram.com!

The Accounting Cycle covers activities in two distinct sections -- four that happen with every transaction, and six that happen when the reporting period is over. Learn all about accounting cycle activities like debits and credits, adjusting entries, preparing a trial balance, and more with this tutorial.

Before you know it, you'll be acing your exams and impressing your accounting friends. If you have any, that is.

Promotional Products and the Ad Specialty Item

2007-02-06T14:51:00.000-08:00

I ran across a few good articles regarding promotional products and the ad specialty item in a series called "Marketing to Make Your Message Stick." These are a must-read for anyone responsible for purchasing promotional products, finding the right ad specialty item, or otherwise promoting their business. Enjoy!

Promoting Your Business -- The 4th P
Ad Specialty Items -- What Works and What Doesn't
21st Century Ad Specialty Item

egrips: Ad Specialty Item for the 21st Century

2007-01-10T12:03:00.000-08:00

Remember when we were kids, and mom would get those hokey refrigerator magnets from local businesses like the insurance agent or real estate broker? Those businesses used those magnets for one simple reason -- the magnet sat on the refrigerator which sat right next to the kitchen phone, so a business could be sure their message would be visible whenever you made a phone call.

Guess what? Everybody has a cell phone now, and they aren't using it anywhere near the refrigerator. So how can businesses get their message out to consumers whenever they reach for their phones? With egrips® appliqués, that's how!

Here in the 21st century, egrips® appliqués are the most effective ad specialty item a business can own. Period. How often do you reach for your cell phone? That's how often your message can reach your customers. How often do you see someone else talking on their cell phone? That's how often your logo get reach the people around them. I can't believe there are still business people out there who don't know about this ad specialty item!

Find out more about making egrips appliqués your own ad specialty item.

The best way to study finance

2005-05-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

Trolling through Google again today, and I'm amazed at what passes for finance tutorials on the internet. Try it yourself -- search for FINANCE TUTORIALS and check out the top returns. They're all just static text, no interaction required at all. Hell, if that was good enough then I'd stick with the textbook and wouldn't be googling for help.

On the flip side, check out these finance tutorials. Unlike the others, these (courtesy of College-Cram.com) actually let you use your own numbers and (gasp!) walk you through the answers.

How many finance students and MBA neophytes can College-Cram save? Ummm... all of them.

How to make business math add up

2005-05-05T12:14:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting activity for you: type BUSINESS-MATH TUTORIALS into Google and look at the results. Choice #1 is a list of 13 (!) tutorials on About.com; choice #2 some company called StaffKit with some 33 topics covered. Choice #3 is College-Cram.com's Business Math page which has 109 tutorials.

Yes, that's one hundred and nine topics, covering everything from fractions and percents to various depreciation methods to financial ratios. It has practically every topic in my business math textbook, at a much lower price tag.

Just thought you'd like to know.

Silver Linings (and a Dark Cloud too)

2004-12-18T11:13:00.000-08:00

In keeping with the holiday season, I'm going to do something positive. Here are a couple of holiday gifts from me to you:

1. If you need help with using a graphing approach to solving systems of linear equations, there's a great little FREE program on www.College-Cram.com/library/study-algebra.htm (It's towards the bottom of the page.) It lays things out clearly, and walks you through the steps to find the solution. I like that it lets you use your own numbers (great for "checking" your homework), and also that it will acknowledge the trick questions of identical and parallel lines.

2. My college accounting textbook had a balance sheet in it, but it did a poor job of explaining what each entry meant. If you're taking accounting, then, there's a FREE tutorial on the Balance Sheet at www.College-Cram.com/library/study-accounting.htm that you need to see. (It's near the top of the page.) Click the "To Learn More" button to bring up a tabbed breakdown of the four sections (Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Summary). By mousing over the tabs and labels, you get detailed explanations of each line item. This is some very useful stuff.

3. OK, this one isn't positive, but I ran across this and you have to laugh. Check out the OnLine Study Guide for chapter 12 on this publisher site. First of all, the chapter name you picked doesn't match the one on the screen. Second, it has four links for #12-16, each of which has exactly the same picture. How is that helpful? Third, it has four links for #12-13 -- not only are they all dead links, but someone brilliantly noted on the page that two are dead. (Was fixing them too much to ask?)

All this from a publisher that supposed to be helping you pass Art History. Yeah, right.

P.S. Woah, this is cool. I went back and tried to trick the program in #1 above by giving two equations that were almost but not quite parallel (3x-2y=8, -3x+2y=5). The bugger figured it out, and told me the lines weren't parallel but 'nearly so.' Impressive!

Hey publishers, you suck-diddly-uck!

2004-11-12T09:48:00.000-08:00

Internet study tools, according to Homer

Have you seen what passes for study tools on the Internet lately? Online study guides with little if any useful content, broken links, “interactive” activities that consist solely of clicking Next to continue… To paraphrase Homer, “I’ve seen tools suck before, but these are the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked.”

Here’s an example of what NOT to do; click Demo and select the Interactive Marketing Activities. (This one is especially painful because I actually worked on this, over my extreme moral objections). While stylish and functional, this product is not worth the money they paid or the time I spent on it – are any students out there going to learn anything from this? I think not. (I’m especially glad they got another company to re-skin it and put their name on it instead of ours.)

Have publishers forgotten what it means to create something helpful for the student? Maybe they just decided it’s better to have any old thing so they can check it off on some list they pass off to instructors.

(Oh, and don’t forget that the cost for all this free crap got rolled into your hyper-expensive textbook.)

If you’re as dissatisfied with these tools as I am, don’t just refuse to use them. Let your instructor know how crapulent they are, and ask her/him to demand better from the publishers.

Just don’t expect the publishers to do any better.

Strange Fruit?

2004-11-05T11:33:00.000-08:00

Are instructors prejudiced against free enterprise?

There is a strange paradox afoot in the halls of our universities. I have visited websites that attempt to catalog the wide variety of e-learning materials available on the internet. (“Mathtools” is one example; “Merlot” is another.) Members can post links to stuff they find, and their peers can comment on their choices.

So here’s the paradox: resources that are “for-sale” are generally trashed by instructors -- not because of their relevance or usefulness, but solely because their owners have the gall to actually charge money for their use. Instructors likewise wonder aloud that there must be other resources on the Internet that folks don’t have to pay for.

Wait a minute… aren’t these the same instructors that get paid for teaching? Aren’t they the same instructors that tell their students to go out and buy the $120+ textbook? Don’t some of these instructors teach Economics, or Entrepreneurship?

Isn’t there a saying, “Those who can’t do, teach”?

What the hell is E-Learning?

2004-11-02T14:55:00.000-08:00

Within the university environment, the term ‘e-learning’ is tossed around like week-old jello in a food-fight. Many vendors tout their e-learning solutions, but what exactly is e-learning anyway?

IMHO, e-learning has been a whisper of a promise. It’s something we’ve been promised, like flying cars, but have yet to see in our driveway. It takes the basic learning experience – a student who wants information, interacting with a teacher having that information – and enhances that relationship in the unique ways allowable by the Internet.

It sure as hell isn’t an e-book – you can turn pages in a book yourself, you don’t need a $500 computer for that.

It isn’t an electronic gradebook or classroom management program – while nice and potentially useful, those help the teacher and give the student no real direct benefit.

It isn’t an email program and chat capability – both can help enhance communication, but you can’t really teach with them.

No, e-learning is an enhancement of the classroom experience. It captures the lecture, the examples scrawled on the board, and the illustrations from the text, and expands them as only the Internet can. It adds true interactivity (the kind where you can manipulate the environment or scenario given to learn new things). It offers specific, targeted help when and how that help is needed. It answers to the needs of the student, not of the teacher.

The folks at www.College-Cram.com have the right idea. Their library is chock full of tutorials, formula solvers, and other programs that deliver the promise of e-learning right now.

I hope that means there’ll be a shiny new flying car in my driveway tomorrow morning.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

2004-10-19T08:16:00.000-07:00

Some hidden reasons why college textbooks are so expensive

The National Association of College Stores has a breakdown of where each dollar goes for a new textbook. A closer look at their logic, though, reveals enough slight-of-hand to make Penn and Teller genuflect in awe.

First, let’s take their categories for the non-bookstore portion. (Face it, no matter what the publisher charges the bookstore is going to make their cut – at least they aren’t shy about telling you that.)

32.8 (42%) -- Paper, Printing, Editorial Costs
15.6 (20%) -- Publisher Marketing Costs
11.8 (15%) -- Author Income
10.2 (13%) -- Publisher General and Admin
1.0 (1%) -- Freight Expenses
7.2 (9%) -- Publisher Income

After removing the bookstore parts, we find that 78.6 cents per dollar go to the publisher. If we divide each number by 78.6, we get the percentage of textbook dollars attributed to each category.

(FYI, I’ve spent almost twenty years working in various capacities within the college textbook publishing industry, so I have more than a passing familiarity with what goes on behind the curtain.)

OK, let’s talk about these categories now:

Paper, Printing, Editorial Costs – Paper and printing are such a small part of the cost of a book that it’s embarrassing. Called PP&B in the industry (the ‘B’ is binding), this can run from $2 or less for a typical study guide to $12 or so for a high-quality art or biology text. So, pulling back this particular curtain, we find that the lion’s share of this category is editorial costs. I won’t address the relative worth of these editorial costs, but they are incurred whether publishers print a physical book or create an e-book. It’s easy to see, then, that the idea of going the e-book route is not going to do much to reduce the cost of the textbook.

Publisher Marketing Costs – Publishers send their sales people to your professor’s office to convince her/him to use their textbook. How do they do this? Certainly not by striving to produce the highest quality, most useful book imaginable. No, they give the professor armfuls of “free” stuff to help them teach the class – copies of the student text, instructor manuals, answer books, powerpoints, etc. They also dangle “free” stuff for the student to use, like student websites, bundled CDs, etc. Who do you think pays for all that free stuff? That’s right, you do.

Author Income – 15% royalties… are these guys on crack? Twenty years ago major authors were getting a 15% royalty, but not anymore. Go ahead and ask any of your professors who have written textbooks, they’ll tell you. The trend over recent years is to get royalties down to 10-12%, putting more profits in the publishers’ pockets.

Publisher General and Admin – All big businesses try their damnedest to avoid paying taxes using whatever legal means are available. (We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.)

Freight Expenses – Can’t do much with this one, except that recently at least one major college textbook publisher has begun charging the bookstores a restocking fee for returned books. This will reduce some of the freight expenses, but shouldn’t have much impact on the bottom-line cost of the book (although it is pissing off a lot of bookstore managers).

Publisher Income – The chart says this is 9%, but that’s too low. At the very least it’s got to be 12% or more, based solely on the reduced royalties being paid nowadays.

By conservative estimates, then, around half the cost of a textbook is attributed to the business practices of the publishing industry (editorial and marketing costs). E-books is not the way to bring down these costs, revamping the business practices is.

…And now a word from our sponsor

2004-10-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

Can textbook publishers learn from television’s history?

In the early days of television, broadcasters turned to vaudeville and theater producers to create their programming. These producers simply created vaudeville and theater shows, and stuck a camera in the audience as an afterthought. They didn’t understand the capabilities of the new medium, and so did a minimal job incorporating it into their more familiar works. Eventually, it took an outside industry – Hollywood – to produce shows specifically for television, introducing techniques familiar to today’s viewers that made for a more effective medium.

College textbook publishers are experiencing a similar situation regarding the Internet. Like the early TV producers, today’s publishers continue to make textbooks, and convert them in some fashion into Internet components as an afterthought – vaudeville and theater are replaced by E-books and web sites that offer static illustrations and text. None of these are specifically produced for the Internet, and deviate only slightly from the traditional publishing paradigm.

By its very nature, the Internet is capable of providing far better (and less expensive) learning tools than those currently provided. College students are clamoring for these tools, but the textbook publishers have been inadequate to this task. Clearly, it is up to someone else to deliver on the Internet’s promise.

The Smartacus Corporation of Fort Worth, Texas is one company that delivers the goods. Their website College-Cram.com features a library of study programs covering college-level math, business, science, and languages. In many ways, these study programs are more effective learning tools than traditional textbooks.

Lower cost – College students spend $120 or more on each new textbook. Publishers, who get no revenue from “used” book sales, regularly publish new editions every three years to force more “new” book purchases; often these new editions are little changed from the preceding edition. College-Cram.com offers its entire library of study programs for only $15 per month, with further discounts for longer subscriptions.

Focused learning – Every study program in College-Cram.com’s library focuses on a single concept, such as calculating sales tax or the structure of the human heart. Students know which concepts they need to study, and need a way to get to them quickly without slogging through other concepts in the chapter that they already understand.

Effective teaching techniques – Study programs in the College-Cram.com library are presented in ways that best convey the intended concept, often addressing multiple learning styles to ensure the best learning experience. For example, tab-tutor programs include a labeled illustration (for the visual learner), two different ways to work the formula (for the hands-on learner), and a glossary of terms (for reading-oriented learners).

In addition, resources that are typically static are presented more effectively in this library. The Periodic Table and Logarithm Tables, for instance, come with instructions on how to use them, while financial statements provide explanations for each line item that are usually buried within the textbook, if provided at all.

True interactivity – Unlike the E-books and such offered by textbook publishers, College-Cram.com’s study programs are truly interactive. Formula-solvers, for example, accept numbers from the student and walk them through the steps required to solve math and science problems. Similarly, financial ratio solvers show the steps and also where to find the proper values on financial statements.

Those early vaudeville and theater producers ended up being replaced by their more effective film producer counterparts, who went on to transform the industry. Will the textbook publishers learn from television’s early history, and change their ways before it’s too late? Tune in next week…

2004 baseball playoffs

2004-10-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

OK, this has nothing to do with e-learning, except that by reading this on the internet you might learn something. (Is that too much of a stretch?)

Anyway, here goes. My name is Rudy, and I am a Yankee fan. Not one of those "hey these guys won a world series, I'd better start liking them" kind of fan. I've been a fan since I was a kid, back in the 70s when Horace Clarke was one of their better players. (If you don't know who he was, don't feel bad -- his own mother probably needed a scorecard to tell which player he was. Bad, bad, bad...)

There is nothing better in sports than a Yankee-Red Sox playoff. Period. It's like, every great hero needs a great villain. (You decide who's who.) Whoever wins this, they are going to roll all over the national league champs. Again.

OK, I got that out of my system.