Calling all Teachers: Ponder eBooks with Thuze and EPUB

Until now, Ponder worked on any text that rendered in the browser (including PDFs), but for longer texts we have been hankering after a way to organize Ponder activity around chapters and sub-sections of documents. EPUB is a widely used open standard for publishing structured documents which suits our needs well.

At the OpenEd 2013 conference, I met Victoria Kinzig from Bridgepoint Education who introduced me to Bridgepoint's versatile new EPUB reader and textbook library, Thuze.

Thuze offers over 100 peer-reviewed e-textbooks across 23 disciplines from Health Care Administration to Ethics to Criminal Justice to various History texts, all of which you can read on the device of your choosing (Android, iPhone, iPad, and browser) for $35/textbook.Signing up for a Ponder + Thuze pilot means you will get free access to a Thuze account (no textbook purchase necessary).

DIY Textbooks

But wait, there's more. In addition to being a reader for Thuze texts, Thuze built a platform to allow instructors to publish their own compilations of text (e.g. EPUBS of any works in the public domain available on Project Gutenburg, feedbooks or mobileread; OR simply author documents through their editing interface.)

Ponder works on Thuze in the web browser as you would expect, with the same in-context aggregations of student reactions to the text.

The big new feature in Ponder + Thuze is we can now roll up student activity by chapter and section. The nicely paginated reading experience on Thuze doesn't hurt either.

Sign up to try it out!

If you're interested, tell us a bit about your class Ponder and some examples of EPUB texts you will be using.Learnings from the pilots will (of course!) be incorporated into the product and released for everyone.