Today’s reference comes from one of the industry’s most internationalized corporations, Copyright Clearance Center, and focuses on education outside the classroom amid the pandemic.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

‘Quickly Shifting to In-Home Teaching’

In Monday’s edition (March 23), we looked at two resources for international industry players that offer support in two different ways during the worldwide coronavirus COVID-19 emergency:

• The UK’s Publishers Association is updating guidance for companies in the British market primarily relative to business considerations and requirements.
• The Association of American Publishers is updating a list of various publishers’ use of their content during the ongoing struggle.

You can find that story about those resources here.

Today, with the help of the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) staff, we have a look at what various publishers are offering in terms of education—which, of course, has at all grades, ages, and levels moved away from the danger of physical campuses and into the realm of online alternatives.

Needless to say, the greatest and most important challenge for everyone in world publishing—and as in our editorial, we urge you to prioritize this—is your safety and that of the colleagues with whom you work.

As luck would have it, the newly deepened restrictions on movement imposed on British society Monday evening (March 23) by Boris Johnson in his address to that nation (BBC’s video of that 10-minute address is here), are overtaking a dangerous controversy of last weekend, when some of the chain bookstores in the UK were being kept open over the express objections and fears of their workers.

You’ll find that the CCC listing of “learning-at-home resources” features references to material not only for publishing industry interests but also for readers. This, understandably, is a common element in many such compendia of available content.

And like Publishing Perspectives, CCC is an aggressively internationalized company and suite of services, so it’s capable of bringing to you through this resource some of the world’s best content. We encourage world publishers to be in touch with the company to explicate what you have available.

While for the purposes of a trade news medium like ours, the direct B2B approach is most easily taken onboard, the mission of the world industry’s work, of course is to serve the international consumer readership. This offers an interesting blend, as it turns out, of the business-directed and readership-oriented appeals, not entirely to be dismissed because it’s an unusual chance to look at how we speak to each other and how we speak to our customers.

For example, here is Scholastic’s ever-dependable service to families, rolling out voluminous and colorful activities and entertainment—”When you’ve finished your journeys, you’re ready for the daily reading quest.”

By contrast, Scholastic lies on the list next to the nonprofit Project MUSE collaboration’s support for participating publishers.

The program is “making scholarly content temporarily available on our platform” free of charge. Project MUSE is a collaborative data base initiative between libraries and publishers bringing together peer-reviewed journals and ebooks.

And in announcing what it’s doing, the Project MUSE effort lists among its publishers making content free for the current emergency are:

• Johns Hopkins University Press (all books and journals)
• Ohio State University Press (all books and journals)
• University of Nebraska Press (all books and journals)
• University of North Carolina Press (all books)
• Temple University Press (all books)
• Vanderbilt University Press (selected books)

Project MUSE organizers add, “We expect to announce additional participants and will continually update the list of publishers offering free access to content.”

PBS, New York Times, ‘Facing History’

Another strong point of this list is its way of bringing several media into the mix.

Here, for example, is the PBS Learning Media group, with “Bring the World to Your Classroom” content, which includes the Ken Burns in the Classroom series’ featured resources on Women’s History Month.

And among our favorites, The New York Times’ Learning Network, which is leading at this writing with “An Argumentative-Writing Unit for Students Doing Remote Learning from Michael Gonchar and Katherine Schulten. It comes with a teacher’s guide (PDF), which we’re committing to memory. Not that we’d ever be interested in argumentative writing, of course.

The Times’ Learning Network has been at work since 1998 and offers students a free account to the Times at a particularly good moment to introduce them to following mainstream news sources. Here’s a video to get them signed up.

And especially valuable in a moment of this kind, the Facing History and Ourselves program–designed to counter bigotry and hate–is making particularly incisive programming available, such as its educator resource for teaching current events, “Coronavirus: Protect Yourself and Stand Against Racism.”

More listings from CCC include not only the leading publishers, of course, but also some you may not normally encounter, including:

• National Wildlife Federation with its “Ranger Rick” program
• The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education‘s Novel Coronavirus Education Resources
• Future Learn’s content relative to the COVID-19 crisis
• Cengage Learning, with an offer of its entire 14,000-ebook vault and all digital platforms opened free to students
• Macmillan’s Bedford, Freeman & Worth program of high-school instruction for schools

CCC’s team is updating the list regularly and is open to comments and suggestions for pertinent additions that can be of use to a strained education community during the duration of the emergency.

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More from Publishing Perspectives the coronavirus outbreak is here.

In our Spring 2020 Magazine, Publishing Perspectives has interviewed publishers, industry experts, entrepreneurs, and authors to present a look at the book business for the coming year. Inside this issue of Publishing Perspectives Magazine, you’ll find articles and resources including:

• Publishing and the coronavirus
• Richard Charkin’s view of key industry challenges
• China’s growing comic book market
• Brussels Book Fair debuts its rights center
• Eksmo CEO Evgeny Kapyev on Russia’s book market
• Matchmaking for publishers and producers in Latin America
• Book market data
• A world tour of copyright developments
• Translation sales resulting from Norway’s Frankfurter Buchmesse guest of honor program
• An AI startup creating interactive stories
• An interview with author Andrew Keen

Download ‘Publishing in Times of Crisis’ free of charge here.