Learning materials, from textbooks to coursepacks, continue to migrate rapidly from print to digital formats. UCLA Store, which serves 35,000 undergraduate and 16,000 graduate students, recently completed an extensive search for a digital platform provider for its custom publishing division, UCLA Course Reader Solutions.
As part of the division’s rebranding and product initiative, UCLA Store’s Publishing and Outreach Director, Guy Adams, selected Symtext?s Liquid Textbook platform as one of the main platforms to provide UCLA?s faculty and students with market leading technology and services for custom digital learning materials.
With Symtext, UCLA Store satisfies several objectives: the requirement to provide faculty and students with a store managed, on-campus learning materials solution that showcases UCLA Course Reader Solutions? services; market leading assembly and distribution tools for custom digital learning materials; support for mobile devices including iPad and Android; a clear and sustainable business model; and a reduction in the store’s reliance on paper. UCLA Course Reader Solutions also gains enormous flexibility over copyright and permissions: using Symtext?s permissions management engine the group clears its own copyrights, realizing very competitive prices that save students money.
?The Symtext Liquid Textbook platform provides a powerful all-around solution from every angle: it?s feature-rich for students, stable for faculty, and easy to manage for the bookstore. It?s an elegant solution for digital course materials.? says Adams.
Importantly, the Liquid Textbook platform and workflow processes allow UCLA Course Reader Solutions to operate at scale: with active plans to expand, the group already produces over 50,000 coursepacks a year, all of which will be offered to students in digital form this year. Taken as a whole, Symtext?s platform and services differentiates UCLA Store from generic online booksellers, and enhances the Store?s position as the go-to learning materials resource for UCLA students and faculty.
Symtext?s Liquid Textbook platform is an enterprise level digital learning materials SaaS (Software as a Service) platform designed for schools ? usually in partnership with the campus store ? to source, assemble and distribute custom, HTML5, mobile, social, digital learning materials.
Partners using the platform benefit from a number of features and services:
- Liquid Textbook Builder: Easy to use assembly tools which include full text previews, dynamic pricing, admin and account management tools, and mobile access.
- Liquid Textbook Readers: HTML5, social, device neutral, mobile. Integrated across platforms in which annotations and other content added via the iPad, for example, appear on laptops and Android tablets in real time.
- Flexible authentication and commercialization options: Combine LMS or direct authentication with a variety of commercialization techniques, including the sale of pin codes in-store or online.
- Content: Includes chapters, cases, videos, presentations, links, and self-authored materials.
- Branding: Present the school or campus store logos and colors to faculty and students
- Online and offline apps: Symtext?s offline apps download all available materials, while synchronizing annotations and comments between offline and online modes.
- Search: Lightning fast document searching and universal searching. A universal search instantly returns hits from all the documents contained in a Liquid Textbook
- Highly advanced OCR and document conversion technology: Symtext can take virtually any file, including very low quality digital scans, and produce a searchable, highlightable, “active” document.
- LMS integration tools and services: Single Sign On via the LMS saves students from creating separate IDs and passwords.
- Change and modify the contents of a Liquid Textbook at any time with the inclusion of links, videos, articles, self-authored materials and etc.
- Sophisticated permissions management tools: Ability to implement detailed permissions, from pricing to printing, for every item in a Liquid Textbook.
- Custom Metrics: Schools concerned about losing usage and learning patterns data to large online booksellers now have a solution.
The UCLA Store, an enterprise of the Associated Students UCLA, has been selling Bruin merchandise since UCLA established its Westwood campus in 1919. In the spirit of our motto, ?It All Comes Back To You,? all proceeds from UCLA Store are reinvested in a variety of ways including top-notch products and services for the UCLA community, state-of-the-art campus facilities and funding for student activities.
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