FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Dubuque, IA –Beginning in January 2013, ByPass Publishing, an educational start-up based in Dubuque, Iowa, is offering free “test drives” of their new product, Psychology in the Fastlane, the first title of the company’s emerging Fastlane Series.
This new, instructor-centric application effectively removes the bookstore and the traditional textbook publisher from the picture, and puts the instructor in total control, or “the driver’s seat” as the company founders are quick to note.
More than 40 subject matter experts were recruited to create the baseline content for this first product using a highly collaborative process that represents “a fundamental rethinking of how traditional textbook content should be created, controlled, and delivered” according to Dale Doty, Chairman of the Psychology Department at Monroe Community College in Rocehster, New York.
“Bypass Publishing is based upon the radical concept that instructors know what’s best for their courses–imagine that–and therefore should have the freedom and flexibility to arrange, edit, and enhance course content to support the learning outcomes they decide are most important,” said Doty, one of the key collaborators who helped put the Bypass concept on the road.
The result is a powerful multi-modal content publishing system that allows instructors to efficiently create their own course-specific online textbook by selecting high quality, peer-reviewed content and then customizing it – all the way down to the sentence level if they so choose.
For Psychology in the Fastlane the base content consists of 18 chapters that have been divided into 350, peer-reviewed “student learning outcomes” that cover virtually every topic in the Introductory Psychology course. ByPass Publishing has even identified the Top 50 topics that students struggle with the most (based on research with over 500 instructors).
With this framework as a launching point, instructors can select the chapters and learning outcomes that apply to their course, arranging them to match their course syllabus. The Fastlane application then provides the instructor/author with an easy to use “content editor” that facilitates deep, sentence by sentence editing. Instructors can also add hyperlinks, videos, audio and visuals, and can even integrate their own materials for a truly customized text.
These personalized psychology textbooks are then “published” to students online, accessible by a wide range of devices with access to the Internet.
The upside for students: no more paying up to $200 for a textbook only to feel it is partially used by the instructor. Students can purchase online access to their instructor’s version of the Fastlane text for around $55. For those students who aren’t quite ready to give up paper and ink, they can have a printed version of their instructors text drop-shipped from the company’s print on demand facility–for little more than the actual cost of printing and shipping, that’s under $12 in most cases.
The upside for instructors: total control of their textbook content at a price their students will appreciate.
To learn more about ByPass Publishing’s Fastlane series, or to find out how you can test drive Psychology in the Fastlane, contact:
Justine Page
877-665-2323 ext. 805
