[Athen] Learning Ally

[Deborah Armstrong via athen-list]

Our college has an arrangement with our state chancellor's office to acquire learning ally accounts for any student needing them.
Though I depended heavily on Recording For the Blind when I went to college in the 1970's, I rarely find they have the books I need. The student requires the 16th edition of something and Learning Ally only has the third edition.
But lately, they have been heavily marketing to me. Our local rep emailed me to ask why I hadn't used the service in a while and what could they do for me.
It seems like their model of having human volunteers record books just isn't going to work for the constant updating of textbooks that now occurs. But because they describe diagrams the books can still be useful for blind students, if only it wasn't an edition from the previous decade.
They also heavily market their voiceText to the point my dean asked why I wasn't using that service. But in reality nearly all those books are for elementary school age pupils.
Their focus on K12 also makes them less useful for higher ed. I feel sort of bad about this, because my students can get free accounts, but if it's a free useless account, does it matter?
Your thoughts?
--Debee

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman22.u.washington.edu/pipermail/athen-list/attachments/20260128/34151d7e/attachment.html>