Electronic textbooks (or e-textbooks) and their business models are evolving quickly and represent a singular opportunity for the higher education community to serve students more efficiently both academically and financially. Motivated by the desire to enhance student learning outcomes, reduce student expenditures on course materials and influence the terms of sustainable business models, the University at Buffalo Libraries has administered four different e-textbook pilots serving over 2000 students over the last nine months. These include:
- a course-based pilot facilitated by Internet2/ EDUCAUSE (CourseLoad)
- a site license targeted to introductory biology courses (Nature Publishing Group)
- a multi-campus State University of New York pilot (CourseSmart)
- a student-based pilot facilitated by Internet2/ EDUCAUSE (CourseSmart)

This project briefing will discuss the common and unique administrative challenges and opportunities of the pilots, including engagement of teaching faculty, identity management issues, necessary partnerships, and license negotiations. The briefing will also focus on student and faculty attitudinal survey data and usage statistics that address learning outcomes, e-textbook features and functionality, format preferences, and cost considerations.

 http://library.buffalo.edu/findlibrarymaterials/e-textbooks/

In 2012, the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) collaborated with 195 institutions to collect responses from more than 100,000 students about their technology experiences. Technology is a critical part of students’ learning environments for both traditional brick-and-mortar classrooms as well as e-learning settings. This annual study explores technology ownership, use patterns, and perceptions of technology among higher education undergraduate students. Key findings for 2012 are organized around four broad thematic messages:
(1) Blended-learning environments are the norm; students say that these environments best support how they learn.
(2) Students want to access academic progress information and course material via their mobile devices, and institutions deliver.
(3) Technology training and skill development for students is more important than new, more, or “better” technology.
(4) Students use social networks for interacting with friends more than for academic communication.

An update on the 2013 survey will be included in this session, as will information on how to participate in the 2014 survey.

 http://www.educause.edu/ecar/about-ecar/ecar-annual-study-students-and-it

The emergence of digital devices, learning platforms, and applications promises easier access to a variety of content, increased productivity, and realization of personalized learning. Unfortunately, the reality is that it is a major challenge to make productive use of digital resources to meet the diverse learning needs of students without involving time-consuming and costly custom integrations. This session will share how leading institutions are collaborating with leading technology providers to establish an open foundation in an age of cloud-based computing that is revolutionizing how digital content, mobile devices, learning platforms and student systems come together to enable personalized learning and student success.

Presentation

Paul Joseph
Systems Librarian
University of British Columbia

The University of British Columbia (UBC) Library, in partnership with UBC’s Information Technology Services and Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, has implemented a collaborative campus-wide course reserves service solely in the context of Blackboard, integrating with several key campus systems. The service is currently managed using the Ares application by Atlas Systems, and receives course and enrollment data in real-time via an enterprise message bus and restricts access to reserves in all courses and sections based on enrollment. This presentation will begin with background on the teaching and learning context at UBC: changes to the university’s copyright environment, the decision to implement Blackboard, and the need for UBC Library to provide an electronic course reserves service. It will then touch on the decision to select Ares as a starting point and to provide access to it solely in the context of Blackboard. The session will then focus on the implementation of the system, focusing on utilization of the Summon API to search the Library’s print and electronic collections for materials in support of a course. The API results are used to populate fields in the existing Ares reserves request forms, which greatly reduces manual data entry. The API is also used to store persistent and EZproxied Summon URLs, rather than those supplied by publishers and vendors, which ensures more stable access to the Library’s e-resources. The presentation will end with a demonstration of the service, providing details on the integration of the different systems as well as insights into the development process, challenges, complexities and concomitant benefits.

Glenda Morgan
Director of Academic Technology Services
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Chuck Dziuban
Director, Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness
University of Central Florida

Joshua Morrill
Senior Evaluation Consultant
University of Wisconsin-Madison

This session includes the results from a large national study of how undergraduate students find, use, and learn from digital resources of all types, including open educational resources and online library materials. The study used a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the paths that students followed through sets of both online and non-online resources in a variety of different scenarios. The resulting data was used to construct models of the key determinants that shape how students approach learning new information in different situations and especially how they navigate online resources to address learning goals. Furthermore, the models were used to develop a set of student learning archetypes, which allowed for identification of four major ways that students approach learning through technology and improved understanding of the circumstances under which they adopt these approaches. The results of this study have major implications for libraries and information technology organizations for how student learning is supported in higher education.

The recent explosion in popularity of massive, open, online courses (MOOCs) caused the librarians at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University to think about how to use this new way of teaching to sell the concept of librarians as experts. To do this, ZSRx was created; it is a free, four-week, open, online course for Wake Forest parents and alumni, designed to help them use the Web more effectively while having fun, connecting with others, and learning about new tools. This session will outline the process and challenges of planning, designing, building, and ultimately facilitating the course, using a plethora of Google tools.

Presentation

As part of an ongoing plan to transform an underutilized science and engineering library into a lively incubator for student-faculty collaboration and innovation, staff at the University of Nevada, Reno decided to launch a bold initiative: build a 3D scanning and printing “makerspace” and make it available to the entire campus. The service has been wildly successful with 3D printers running 24 hours a day. Furthermore, positioning the library as a place that facilitates knowledge creation beyond text based tools and resources has been a game changer. Students are highly motivated to learn new skills in order to take advantage of new technologies (Lynda.com gets heavy use); they experiment and iterate quickly to perfect their designs. Even better, students from engineering are now rubbing elbows with people from fields such as biology, computer science, geology, and even art. Like the printing press and the personal computer, 3-D printers have been hailed as a revolutionary device that will ultimately transform the way the world operates.

 Presentation

Millind Basole
eText Lead
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently debuted an innovative approach to providing students with electronic textbooks and instructional materials. The etext platform and process provides an endpoint-neutral and completely accessible platform for presenting text, equations and a variety of multimedia in textbook form. The content comes from two major sources: faculty developed content (both where faculty retain copyright as well as open textbooks), and publisher owned content. Academic Technology Services is actively seeking to partner with the library to leverage library holdings for use in etextbooks where such uses are possible. The benefits of the etext at Illinois service includes considerably lower costs for students, publishing opportunities for faculty, device neutrality, and a platform that is markedly more accessible and easier to use than most commercial solutions. This briefing will include a demonstration of eText at Illinois and the technical infrastructure underlying it, a discussion of the process and approach to accessibility, and a review of future plans and strategies for expanding the service.

 https://etext.illinois.edu

Susan Fliss
Interim Librarian of Harvard College for Research and Instruction
Harvard University

In May of 2012, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced edX, a groundbreaking new partnership in online learning. This session will give an overview of edX and HarvardX, with particular attention to the communities of practice being creating to develop and sustain innovation in online learning, in partnership with faculty, students, instructional designers, librarians, information technologists and other participants within and across edX institutions.

http://edx.org