BCU Library

“Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in US Higher Education,” an Ithaka S+R report released today and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, highlights the challenges to be overcome by institutions so that they can take advantage of online learning technologies, and explores why highly interactive online systems have yet to take hold in any substantial way. 

“As online learning systems of this kind are developed, however, a critically important question will be who is going to control the student usage and performance data,” added Mr. Guthrie. “On the web, all actions and behaviors can be tracked and analyzed. These data are critical to refinement of these systems and to our overall understanding of how people learn. These data should not be privatized.”

“Barriers to adoption of these systems vary greatly. Perhaps most importantly, most current systems that are highly interactive do not allow faculty to customize content to suit their specific needs. Faculty are also concerned that online education might distance them from their students. Finally, very little good data exist on the effectiveness of existing highly interactive online systems.”

As this is a new initiative for the library, we're currently talking to as many creative practitioners as possible about how the library can shape services for them. We recently organised mentoring days, focus groups and networking events with partners such as Sheffield Doc/Fest

There's been a real buzz around the British Library recently – for the first time in March we held the Spring Festival, a five day celebration of creativity, fashion and design aimed at the creative industries. There was a lot on show, including a spring market, LATE event with 50 artists working in the front hall and a vintage knitting event – over 1,700 people took part.

Culture -- in higher education, and in our society -- is at the heart of the matter.

We have reduced K-12 schooling to basic skill acquisition that effectively leaves most students underprepared for college-level learning. We have bastardized the bachelor’s degree by allowing it to morph into a ticket to a job (though, today, that ticket often doesn’t get you very far). The academy has adopted an increasingly consumer-based ethic that has produced costly and dangerous effects: the expectations and standards of a rigorous liberal education have been displaced by thinly disguised professional or job training curriculums; teaching and learning have been devalued, deprioritized, and replaced by an emphasis on magazine rankings; and increased enrollment, winning teams, bigger and better facilities, more revenue from sideline businesses, and more research grants have replaced learning as the primary touchstone for decision-making.

The current culture -- the shared norms, values, standards, expectations and priorities -- of teaching and learning in the academy is not powerful enough to support true higher learning. As a result, students do not experience the kind of integrated, holistic, developmental, rigorous undergraduate education that must exist as an absolute condition for truly transformative higher learning to occur.

The first part of the program was a chance to learn the details about the Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Academic and Research Libraries, which was published in January 2012 as a joint project of the Association of Research Libraries, Center for Social Media at American University and the Program for Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University. The second part of the program was from Creative Commons on “Fair Use and Copyright in the Age of the Internet.” (I will probably get those notes done too at some point). I am presenting below the notes I took during the meeting, but you can follow the first presentation at the ARL site, as well as find a lot more information and the actual code at arl.org/fairuse.

The two reports of interest are: The 2011-12 Inside Higher Ed Survey of College and University Chief Academic Officers http://www.insidehighered.com/download?file=finalCAOsurveyreport.pdf Presidential Perspectives, the 2011 Inside Higher Ed Survey of College and University Presidents http://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/archive/storage/files/SurveyBooklet.pdf

The CAO survey had 1081 participants, while the survey of Presidents had 956 participants.  There is no information that can confirm that both the CAO and President from the same institution were in the majority for the respondents. So, the respondents for each report could be from different institutions.

nly one category — library resources and services — did a majority of all presidents (and a bare majority at that: 51 percent) rate the technology investment as “’very effective.’”  You can read the entire article here:  http://www.insidehighered.com/news/survey/president2011

The killer feature to me is not the fun interactive ‘related terms’ web or the websites and images that pop up with each search. It’s the ‘Quizzes’ tool that gives you classroom-ready quiz questions on your search term. It’s downright amazing.

Quick Tip:You can use the little slider at the top of the search results screen to adjust how detailed your results are. You can go from the ABC chalkboard to the Einstein-y looking fella.

With the growing need and ability to be portable comes tremendous opportunity for content providers. But it also requires substantial changes to their thinking and their systems. It requires distribution platforms, API’s and other ways to get the content to where it needs to be. But having an API is not enough. In order for content providers to take full advantage of these new platforms, they will need to, first and foremost, embrace one simple philosophy: COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere).

COPE is really a combination of several other closely related sub-philosophies, including: Build content management systems (CMS), not web publishing tools (WPT) Separate content from display Ensure content modularity Ensure content portability

But to truly separate content from display, the content repository needs to also avoid storing “dirty” content. Dirty content is content that contains any presentation layer information embedded in it, including HTML, XML, character encodings, microformats, and any other markup or rich formatting information. This separation is achieved by the two other principles, content modularity and content portability