Hello WSDLC Members, and welcome to another Flipped Classroom installment. It’s October and that means it’s Advantage Month! Our friends at OverDrive have pulled together a set of resources to help you learn all there is to know about Advantage and Marketplace.
The very first thing we want to make sure we share with you all is this incredibly handy PDF handout (to the right) that was created by OverDrive in August 2024 sepcifically for the WSDLC.
It provides a fantastic overview of what is available for all WSDLC members, and short walkthroughs on how to take advantage of the resources and tools available to all WSDLC members.
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Advantage
What is Advantage/What is an Advantage Account?
Advantage is a program where members of a shared collection can purchase additional titles for their students only. An Advantage Account is an OverDrive Marketplace account that allows a user to purchase titles that will be available only for their students.
Use Advantage to:
- Add additional copies of titles exclusively for specific grades or schools
- Create a unique collection of titles for schools within a district
All Advantage titles will appear alongside the shared collection’s titles, making for a seamless experience for your students.
Start with the Working with an OverDrive Advantage Account (K-12 Schools) video to learn what it’s all about and how to get started:
(This video was also shared in September’s Getting Started Flipped Classroom.)
Your school has an Advantage account. Now what?
You can use your Advantage account to purchase titles for your own Sora collection, adjust the content access levels for your content, create class sets, assign titles to students, and more!
Purchasing Titles
To learn how to search Marketplace and purchase Advantage titles for your school, complete OverDrive’s module Marketplace: Browsing, Building Carts, and Purchasing Titles. In this module, you will learn step-by-step the basics of browsing and shopping in OverDrive Marketplace for your school or district.In addition to (or in lieu of) the purchasing module, watch the 19 minute video Selecting and Purchasing Content in OverDrive Marketplace.
(In March’s Flipped Classroom, we’ll cover some more of the nitty gritty details about purchasing, such as how to add content credit, how to avoid purchasing duplicate titles, and more!)
Lending Models
Titles available in Marketplace have different lending models assigned to them. These lending models are the purchasing and borrowing terms for the ebooks and audiobooks, determined by the publishers. and are One Copy One User, Metered Access, Cost per Circ, and Simultaneous Use. View this video, Getting Started with Lending Models, to get an introduction to each of these lending models and what they mean for the WSDLC collection, or read below to get a brief description of each type.
- One Copy One User: These titles can be checked out to one user at a time, and never expire. For more details, watch the short One Copy One User video.
- Metered Access: These titles expire once set conditions are met, and are broken down in to four types: by time (one user), by checkout (one user), by checkout (concurrent users), and by earlier of x time or y checkouts (one user). For more details, watch the short Metered Access video.
- Cost Per Circ: These titles can be added to your collection, but you only pay when users borrow the title. Cost per Circ titles can be borrowed simultaneously by unlimited users. For more details, work through the Browsing, Adding, and Managing Cost Per Circ Titles in OverDrive Marketplace (K-12 Schools) module, or watch the short Cost per Circ (K-12) video.
- Simultaneous Use (Sim Use): These titles can be borrowed simultaneously by unlimited users, and expire after a determined period of time. For more details, watch the short Simultaneous Use video.
Setting Content Access Levels for Your Purchased Content
As you purchase titles, you may find that the pre-assigned content access levels may not align with your school’s collection policy. Through Marketplace, you have the ability to update the content access level for titles added to your Advantage collection.
(Note: Schools cannot update the content access level for titles in the shared collection. Check out the FAQ section of this blog post from October 2021 to see how content access levels for titles in the shared collection are assigned.)
Watch this recording of a WSDLC webinar to learn more about Content Access Levels for Advantage.
Advantage Filtering
You may find that there are some titles in the shared collection that, because of your school’s policies, shouldn’t be available to your students. That’s where Advantage Filtering comes in! From within your Advantage Account, you can adjust what titles are available to your students. Watch the video Advantage Filtering: Advantage Collection User to learn more:
Class Sets
OverDrive’s Class Set lending model allows you to rent a title, paying per student, and to assign these titles to students. Titles that are rented through Class Sets are available for a set period of time (usually about 30 days), and then expire. Once a title has expired, it can be repurchased if needed.
Watch this video to see how Class Sets can be used in the classroom:
https://marketplace.overdrive.com/Marketplace/ClassSets
Curated Collections and Title Assignments
In Advantage, you also have the ability to curate your own collections (which we’ll be going more in-depth with next month), and to assign specific titles to students and set specific checkout periods. To learn more, try out the OverDrive module Curated Collections, Title Assignments, and Reports in OverDrive Marketplace.
You can also learn more about Title Assignments through the video Assigning Titles to Students.
That brings us to the end of this month’s Flipped Classroom training on Advantage Accounts and Marketplace!
If you have any questions, or would like to know more about Advantage accounts with OverDrive, we encourage you to schedule a 20-minute one-on-one session with a member of the WSDLC OverDrive team. You can reach out to them all at wsdlc@overdrive.com to schedule a session or ask a question.
If you have questions specifically about the WSDLC consortium, you can contact wsdlc-info@wils.org.
See you again in November for our next Flipped Classroom topic: Purchasing!
You can view the full year’s training plan and revisit previous Flipped Classrooms here: WSDLC Training Schedule