Publisher's Corner

Over the last week we talked about using MagCloud in education, as a powerful tool for teachers, and a great asset for students who want to present their work professionally. Today we are moving forward with the same theme to discuss how professors can use MagCloud in higher education.

Whether you teach at a major university, a local community college or a continued education course, print materials for classes are always a concern as far as budget, turnaround-time and quality. MagCloud can help you with all of those challenges, providing beautiful printing, easy-to-use digital distribution options and no-minimum print runs to help you publish content for your students in a timely, affordable and more sustainable fashion. Let’s take a look at a few solutions for professors:

Syllabi

The syllabus is traditionally handed to students as a printed document on the first day of class. For distance education courses, the syllabus can be posted online or even better, mailed to students. By publishing your syllabus through MagCloud, you make it easy for your students and yourself. You can order a bulk of them to hand out in class, direct your students to download a digital version to their PC, tablet device or you can use our ship-to-group feature to drop ship a copy to each of your students on a mailing list.

Easy Re-prints:

There’s always at least one student who loses their syllabus, so when they come to you for help, MagCloud gives you an easy place to direct them–your own unique page–where they can choose whether they want to get a digital version or order a new printed copy that will be delivered right to them, requiring very little effort on your part.

Handouts/Flyers

Throughout the semester/quarter there are regularly occasions to distribute supplemental handouts and flyers. Handouts are a great way to provide support material like graphs, tables, or diagrams, or even slide notes to compliment PowerPoint presentations.

You can use handouts for specific project assignments, recruiting students to join the club you advise, or supplements to the lesson plan. No matter what the purpose, MagCloud is a great asset for printing any number of flyers or handouts. There’s no need to run to the print shop, as you can easily place an order online and have them delivered straight to your office in as little as 3 days.

Other Handout Ideas:

• lesson outlines
• supply and reading lists
• activity guides
• supplementary materials like graphs and statistics
• lab assignments
• study guides
• slide notes for presentations

Course Readers

Course readers provide professors with the ability to customize specific texts for their classes. The material may include chapters from books, articles from magazines/newspapers, website print-outs, cases, or their own work. As a professor, you know that pulling this content together in a way that is compelling for the students is challenging. Standard black and white photo-copies can be tough to read, and photographs, illustrations and art suffer from poor print quality. MagCloud let’s you deviate from these long-antiquated types of course readers by making it possible for you to offer them as both full-color prints and in various digital formats.

Benefits of using MagCloud for your Course Readers:

• free storage of the digital master in PDF format
• no cost to you or your department– it’s free to publish, you/your students only pay when ordering print or marked-up digital files
• publishing is immediate, so your course pack is available to students as soon as you click “publish”
• it’s easy to make your content available to your students in print and digital formats
• easily place orders for direct delivery to the department or use our ship-to-group feature to distribute to a mailing list
• full-color, full-bleed printing makes it possible to showcase art, photography and imagery beautifully–no more grainy black and white images
• easily direct students from all of your classes to collections for their course–you can sort publications by subject or class, and make it easy for your students to access all of your printed course materials in one place

Lab Manuals

If you have authored your own lab manual, you simply need to upload your document as a PDF file for publishing. You can choose whether to order the manual to distribute in class, or if you want to make it available for students to purchase themselves. MagCloud will produce high quality books up to 384 pages from your PDF that can be made available for print, digital download.

Student & Alumni Newsletters & Magazines

We know that being a professor means that you do a lot more than teach classes, so whether it’s for your Mock Trial Team or Journalism Faculty, publishing a newsletter through MagCloud will definitely help your community’s message stand out from the crowd.

Along with community newsletters, a number of educators are using MagCloud to publish the student magazines that they advise. MagCloud’s on-demand printing options mean that you don’t have to sacrifice print quality for a smaller budget or even a small readership. Whether your students are putting together a publication for their program of a couple hundred, or even for their class of 30, you can be confident that all publications are printed in full color with a full bleed on HP Indigo digital presses. These commercial presses have been calibrated to provide a high quality output of all your content, from crisp text to brilliant graphics. Our professional service features make it possible for your students to turn out a publication you can all be proud of.

Example Publications:

• Humbler College assorted student publications
• Zest – Sheridan College Student Magazine
• The Insider – Glendale Community College’s student magazine
• Exeat – annual student publication of the Graphic Design Department of Holland College
• Ampersand Alumni Magazine
• AIU Alumni Newsletter

A Note About Using Copyrighted Work:

Federal copyright laws protect all original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium. When using material that has been written, recorded, or designed by someone else, it is important to make sure that you are not violating copyright law by improperly using intellectual property belonging to someone else. While some items are public domain, most course readers are not considered “fair use” of published works and copyright owners retain all rights to grant or deny permission to use. In other words, do your homework before you print someone else’s content.

Are you an educator using MagCloud? Share in the comments section how you’ve used MagCloud for your needs.