Tag Archives: library

Research Support Ambassadors – an insider’s view

In 2015 the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) started two related programmes. The Supporting Researchers in the 21st century programme is an ongoing series of talks, events and training sessions for the library staff in Cambridge. Some of these we have blogged to share the insights with the wider community – see: Openness, integrity & supporting researchersTips for preparing and presenting online learningEvolution of Library Ethnography Studies – notes from talkLibraries of the future – insights from a talk by Lorcan DempseySoftware Licensing and Open AccessOpen Data – moving science forward or a waste of money & time as a few examples.

The second programme is the Research Support Ambassadors. This began as an idea for people, gathered from across the diverse community in over 200 libraries in Cambridge, to be trained up and develop resources for our research community. As with all nebulous ideas what we began with and where we are now are different, but the programme is taking good shape and after consolidation in Lent Term 2016 will be launched across the University.

This blog is an insider’s view of the Ambassador programme from Claire Sewell, a  member of the first group to sign up to the programme. Claire has recently taken on a new role in the OSC as Research Skills Coordinator and will have responsibility for driving the future direction of the Ambassador Programme.

An insider’s view

Joining the rapidly moving world of Scholarly Communication can be daunting for even the most qualified information professional. Library staff must absorb a wealth of information at the same time as trying to educate users on the latest developments and it can be difficult to know where to start. The Research Ambassador Programme at Cambridge University provides one approach by upskilling library staff at the same time as creating experienced trainers.

Who are the Research Ambassadors?

The Programme was launched over the summer with a view to implementation during theSerious Group photo Michaelmas term. Ambassadors would be given training and support to develop and deliver a range of training products in areas covering the Scholarly Communications remit. Staff from a range of backgrounds across Cambridge were quick to sign up and the first cohort began its preparations. For me the Programme came along at exactly the right time and fulfilled a number of needs as I was able to improve both my subject knowledge and more practical aspects such as teaching skills. The Programme also gave me a chance to work with colleagues I might not ordinarily get a chance to interact with which helped to broaden my perceptions.

Library staff at all levels were encouraged to get involved in a variety of roles from administrative duties to content delivery. This inclusive approach has been one of the key strengths of the Programme as it helps to encourage those who may not normally sign up. There is no pressure to take on a particular task so participants are able to stay within their comfort zone. I knew from the start that there were areas I could work on easily and areas where I would challenge myself and decided to focus on the latter as for me that is what makes a learning experience.

Getting started

The first stage of the Programme involved observing an existing teaching session delivered by colleagues in the Office of Scholarly Communication. I found the observation sessions really interesting as they gave me a chance to reflect on the different ways people approached similar tasks. Our observations were guided using a prompt sheet which covered everything from setting up the room upon arrival to how well the content was explained by the presenter. Watching a session with a critical eye like this is a great way to improve your own practice as a trainer and something I will be looking to do more of in the future.

It was then time to turn our attention to our own training needs by attending two intensive training sessions. The first session looked at knowing your audience, how to deliver a presentation on a practical level and how to avoid basic mistakes. Next we looked at the actual content of the session we would be delivering in more depth. The biggest decision to make was which aspects of such a huge area as Scholarly Communications we would cover in our final information products.

Topic selection

With the needs of our users and ourselves in mind we selected the following areas:

  • the research lifecycle
  • research support services across the University
  • managing your online presence
  • Open Access to theses

We felt this was a good mixture of the topics we felt confident teaching and those we wanted to know more about. We divided into groups looking at individual areas and I chose to go with something I was less familiar with (research support services across the University) in order to broaden by knowledge. As the Programme progresses there will be a chance to explore working in other groups.

The groups then got together to discuss what sort of product they would produce. The results ranged from formal presentations to interactive websites and the variety of products showcased the diverse range of talents participating in the Programme. At the end of this process we presented our ideas to the wider library community and received some valuable feedback which we can use to adapt and improve our products before releasing them into the wild. See ‘Research Support Ambassadors – a Project Update‘  for a discussion of the presentation.

Where do we go from here?

Overall the Programme has been a real professional highlight of 2015 for me. As well as developing new skills, meeting new people and learning about a developing area of librarianship I gained a new role when I became Research Skills Coordinator with the Office of Scholarly Communication! As part of this role I will be helping to lead the Research Ambassadors Programme forward to its next stage and possible future runs. I am very much looking forward to seeing where it can take us!

Published 14 December 2015
Written by Claire Sewell with introduction by Dr Danny Kingsley
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Disruptive innovation: notes from SCONUL winter conference

On Friday 27 November Danny Kingsley attended the SCONUL Winter Conference 2015 which addressed the theme of disruptive innovation and looked at the changes in policy and practice which will shape the scholarly communications environment for years to come. This blog is a summary of her notes from the event. The hastag was #sconul15  and there is a link in Twitter.

Disruptions in scholarly publishing

Dr Koen Becking, President of the Executive Board, Tilburg University, spoke first. He is the lead negotiator with the publishers in the Netherlands. Things are getting tight as we count down to the end of the year given the Dutch negotiations with Elsevier (read more in ‘Dutch boycott of Elsevier – a game changer?‘)

Koen asked: what is the role of a university – is it knowledge to an end, knowledge in relation to learning or knowledge in relation to professional skills? He said that 21st century universities should face society. While Tilburg University is still tied to traditional roots, it is now focused in the idea of ‘third generation university’. The idea of impact on society – the work needs to impact on society.

The Dutch are leading on the open access fight and Koen said they may look at legislation to force the government goal of open access to research articles of 40% by 2016 & 100% by 2024. [Note that the largest Dutch funder NOW has just changed their policy to say funds can no longer be used to pay for hybrid OA and that green OA must be available ‘the moment of’ publication].

Kurt noted that the way the Vice Chancellors got involved in the publisher discussions in the Netherlands was the library director came to him ask about increasing the subscription budget and the he asked why it was going up so much given the publisher’s profit levels. Money talks.

Managing the move away from historic print spend

Liam Earney from Jisc said there were several drivers for the move from historic print spend and we need models that are transparent, equitable, sustainable and acceptable to institutions. They have been running a survey on acceptable metrics on cost allocation (note that Cambridge has participated in this process). Jisc will shortly launch a consultation document on institutions on new proposals.

Liam noted that part of their research found that it was apparent that across Jisc bands and within Jisc bands there are profound differences in what institutions paying for the same material – sometimes by a factor of 100’s of 1000’s pounds different to access the same content in similar institutions.

They also worked out that if they took a mix of historical print spend and a new metric it would take over 50 years to migrate to a new model. This is not realistic.

Jisc is supported by an expert group of senior librarians (including members at Cambridge) who are working on an alternative. Liam noted that historical print spend is harmful to the ability of a consortium to negotiate coherently. Any new solution needs to meet the needs of academics and institutions.

Building a library monograph collection: time for the next paradigm shift?

Diane Brusvoort from the University of Aberdeen comes from the US originally and talked about collaborative collection development – we can move together. Her main argument was that for years we have built libraries on a ‘just in case model’ and we can no longer afford to do that. We need to refine our ‘just in time’ purchasing to take care of faculty requests, also have another strand working across sector to develop the ‘for the ages’ library.

She mentioned the FLorida Academic REpository (FLARE) which is the statewide shared collection of low use print materials from academic libraries in Florida. Libraries look at what is in FLARE and move the FLARE holding into their cataloguing. It is a one copy repository for low use monographs.  The Digital Public Library of America is open to anything that had digitised content can be put in the DPA portal and deals with the problem of items that they are all siloed.

Libraries are also taking books off the shelf when there is an electronic version. This is a pragmatic decision not made because lots of people are reading the electronic one preferentially, it is simply to save shelf space.

Diane noted a benefit of UK compared to UK is the size – it is possible to do collaborative work here in ways you can’t in the US. We need collaborative storage and to create more opportunities for collaborative collections development.

The Metric Tide

Professor James Wilsdon – University of Sussex spoke about the HEFCE report he contributed to The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. 

This report looked at responsible uses of quantitative data in research management and assessment. He said we should not turn our backs on big data and its possibilities but we know of our experience in the research systems that these can be used as blunt tools in the process. He felt that across the community at large the discussion about metrics was unhelpfully polarised. The debate is open to misunderstanding and need a more sophisticated understanding on ways they can be used more responsibly.

The agreement is that peer review is the ‘least worst’ form of academic governance that we have. Metrics should support not supplant academic management. This underpins the design of assessment exercises like the REF.

James noted that the metrics review team was getting back together that afternoon to discuss ‘section d’ in the report. He referred to this as being ‘like a band reunion’.

A new era for library publishing? The potential for collaboration amongst new university presses

This workshop was presented by Sue White, Director of Computing and Library Services and Graham Stone, Information Resources Manager, University of Huddersfield.

Sue talked about the Northern Collaboration of libraries looking at joining forces to create a publishing group. They started with a meeting in October 2104. There is a lot of uncertainty in the landscape, with a big range of activity from well established university presses to those doing no publishing at all. She said the key challenges to the idea of a joint press was the competition between institutions. But they decided the idea merited further exploration.

Discussions were around the national monograph strategy roadmap  that advocated university publishing models. The Northern Collaboration took a discussion paper to Jisc – and they suggested three areas of activity. They were:

  • Benchmarking and data gathering to see what was happening in the UK.
  • Second to identify best practice and possible workflow efficiencies- common ground.
  • Third was exploring potential for the library publishing coalition.

The project is about sharing and providing networks for publishing ventures. In the past couple of days Jisc has agreed to take the first two forward and welcome input. They want some feedback about taking it forward.

Graham then spoke about the Huddersfield University Press which has been around since 2007 – but was re-launched with an open access flavour. They have been publishing open access materials stuff for three to four years. They publish three formats – monographs, journal publications and sound recordings.

The principles governing the Press is that everything is peer reviewed, as a general rule everything should be open access and they publish by the (ePrints) open access repository which gets lots of downloads. The Press is managed by the library but led by the academics. Business model is a not for profit as it is scholarly communication. If there were any surplus it would be reinvested in the Press. In last four years they have published 12 monographs, of which six are open access.

Potential authors have to come with their own funding. Tends to be an institutional funder sponsored arrangement. The proposal form has a question ‘how is this going to be funded’? This point is ignored for the peer review process. Having money does not guarantee publishing. It means it will be looked at but doesn’t guarantee publishing. The money pays for a small print run, copy editing not staff costs. About a 70,000 word monograph costs in the region of £3000-£4000.

Seven journals are published in the repository – there is an overlay on the repository, preserved in Portico. Discoverable through Google (via OAI-PMH) compliance with repository, Library webscale discovery includes membership of the DOAJ. Their ‘Teaching and lifelong learning’ journal has every tickbox on DOAJ.

The enablers for this Press have been senior support in the university at DVC level and the capacity and enthusiasm of an Information Resource Manager to absorb the Press into existing role. Also having an editorial board with people across the institution. The Press is operating on a shoestring hard. It is difficult to establish reputation and convincing the potential stakeholders and impact. A lack of long term funding means it is difficult to forward plan.

They also noted that there are not very many professional support networks out there and it would be good to have one. They need specialist help with author contracts and licences.

Who will disrupt the disruptors?

The last talk was by Martin Eve, Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing, Birkbeck, University of London.  This was an extremely entertaining and thought provoking talk. The slides are available.

Martin started with critical remarks about the terminology of ‘disruptive’, arguing that often the word is used so the public monopoly can be broken up into private hands. That said, there are parts of the higher education sector which are broken and need disruption.

Disruption is an old word – from Latin used first in 15th century. Now it actually means the point at which an entire industry is shifted out. What we see now is just a series of small increments. The changes happening in the higher education sector are not technological they are social and it is difficult to break that cycle of authority and how it works.

Martin argued that libraries need to be strategic and pragmatic. We have had a century long breakdown of the artificial scarcities in trading of knowledge coming to a head in the digital age. There are new computational practices with no physical or historical analogy – the practices don’t fit well with current understandings. He gave a couple of historical examples where in the 1930s people made similar claims.

The book as a product of scholarly communication is so fetishized that when we want the information we need the real object – we cannot conceive of it in another form.

Universities in the digital age just don’t look like they did before. We have an increasingly educated populace – more people can actually read this stuff so the argument that ‘the public’ can’t understand it is elitist and untrue. Institutional missions need to be to benefit society.

Martin discussed the issues with the academic publication market. A reader always needs a particular article – the traditional discourses around the market play out badly. You don’t know if you need a particular article until you read it and if you do need it you can’t replace it with anything else.

Certain publications can have a rigorous review practice because they are receiving high quality submissions. But they only get high quality submissions if you have lots of them and they get that reputation because of a rigorous review practice. So early players have the advantage.

He noted that different actors care about the academic market in different ways. Researchers produce academic products for themselves – to buy an income and promotion. Publishers frame their services as doing things for authors – but they don’t do enough for readers and libraries. Who pays? Researchers have zero price sensitivity. Libraries are stuck between rock & hard place. They have the cash but are told how to spend it. The whole thing is completely dysfunctional as a market. In the academy, reading is underprivileged. Authorship is rewarded.

Martin then talked about open access and how it affects the Humanities. He noted that monographs are acknowledged as different – eg: HEFCE mandate. There are higher barriers for entry to new publishers – people don’t have a good second book to give away to an OA publisher. There are different employment practices, for example creative writers are often employed on a 0.5 contract – they are writing novels and selling them and commercial publishers get antsy about requirements for open access because there is a cross over with trade books.

The subscription model exists on the principle that if enough people contribute then you have enough centrally to pay for what the costs are. It assumes a rivalrous mode – the assumption is there will always be greedy people who won’t pay in if they don’t get an exclusive benefit.

The Open Library of the Humanities is funded by a library consortium. It is based on arXiv funding model and Knowledge Unlatched. Libraries pay into a central fund in the same way of a subscription. Researcher who publish with us do not have to be at an institution who is funding or even at an institution. There are 128 libraries financially supporting the model (as of Monday should be 150). The rates are very low – each one only has to pay about $5 per article. They are publishing approximately 150 articles per year.

Published 28 November 2015
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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Tips for preparing and presenting online learning

This week we had a group of library staff contribute to a roundtable discussion about online training. We were lucky to have visiting Australian Tom Worthington* talk to the group. These are some notes from the wide-ranging discussion.

Online approaches

In face-to-face teaching, a unit in philosophy taught over a semester is very different to a single training session in how to find something in a library catalogue. However in practice in the online world they are the same.

Tom noted that five years ago he decided to stop giving lectures and only deliver courses online. It has taken that time for him to feel comfortable with the online delivery.

The electronic equivalent of the traditional lecture is you prepare a reading block, mail it to the students, give them exercises to do, they write it down and you give them comments. But there is an opportunity to do much more. An example is the book “ICT Sustainability: Assessment and Strategies for a Low Carbon Future“, used for an ANU course.

The ‘flipped classroom’ is an approach where the online component is first. However unless you give them a task they will come to the first day full of excuses. The convenor can give students blocks of exercises. At the face to face section you can have the informal discussion and help them with problems. That works well.

Text based courses can use video that someone else has recorded on the topic. The process is the students:

  • Read the summary of the course
  • Do the readings
  • Do the test
  • Then have a discussion online or in person together.

Asynchronous courses ask students to contribute to an online text based forum. As an example, the questions for week one of “ICT Sustainability”.  The students might be asked to answer questions – find a paper or video on the topic, say why it is relevant. They should post to the forum by the middle of the week, must reply to two other posts by two students by Friday. Then use peer assessment to mark each other’s work. It is good if their contribution is used in some way. Usually allocate 10-20% of the marks to their contribution to the marking of each other’s work. Students will go to remarkable lengths to get small number of marks. Needs to make sense to the long term goal of the student.

One way of presenting a course is to provide small ‘units’ of information which are not timed. At the end of a unit the student does a test and when they pass they move onto the next section.

Using traditional eLearning you would have at most 24 people in each group – you usually still have ‘loud’ people you have to tell to stop writing/talking.

Course structures

There are standards for learning materials. The University provides considerable resources for Learning Aims and Outcomes.

It helps to have rigid statements about what the course is about. These should include learning objectives, how the course is broken up eg: two components and three sub components. See the introduction to “ICT Sustainability”.  Without this structure the student does not know where they are up to. You need to show participants there is a plan.

Tom noted it is important to tell participants why the course will be useful to them and how it will be useful to them. It is very important to provide markers throughout the course. Where are we up to and what is this for? Eg: this will increase your chances of getting a paper published.

It is all in the preparation

Academic bravado is ‘I have a lecture in 5 minutes, I had better get something together’. With eLearning you have to design all the materials and exercises in advance before they start. Gather the materials together – but you always need to consider licenses. A repository – equivalent of an electronic book, videos and quizzes.

Don’t add things on the fly. Once it starts you need to keep things stable. You can take online material and deliver it in person easily. It is much harder to do it the other way.

Preparing online courses is very labour intensive and traditional universities do not provide for the preparation time. However the delivery is much quicker. If you are at the distance education university this is built into the system. But in a traditional university you only get paid for delivery. So first time you run a course, it is at a ‘loss’ but each time after that it is easier. So try to minimise the material beforehand.

The question about the inability to get feedback from people was raised. With online fixed courses you don’t have a way to improve the content for your students. Tom suggested observing the test results helps. The dropout rate is an indicator (and you can always ask people why they dropped out). You can look at what they have been accessing. There is considerable research on ‘Learning Analytics’ and products for extracting the data from Moodle.  There may be things they have not been looking at – it might be the link has broken. The flipped classroom will give people the chance to fix things.

Some concern was raised about reusing information. One person noted that ‘internalising the material requires creating it myself’. The group agreed it was important to ensure the information is stitched together well so there is a real narrative. Tom noted we do have standardised educational materials – they are called text books. You can still use text books in an online course. If we have standard published sources then we should use them.

Preventing cheating

If you just give students reading materials online then they will not read it. You need to give them tasks to do and monitor the results. Give them multiple choice using immediately marked systems. Them knowing there is a test at the end increases their education (even if they get all the answers wrong). Even if the test is not for credit, students will still cheat.

Ways to prevent people cheating at online tests:

  • Limited number of attempts
  • Questions are selected from a bank at random
  • Positions of the multiple-choice answers are randomised
  • If numeric answers, the system generates a random set of values so each student gets a different question

Note that young digital natives are still academically illiterate – they do not naturally know how to write things with proper referencing. They write assignments with broken jargon, not proper referencing and will copy things from Wikipedia. Tom said that he doesn’t call it ‘plagiarism’ in the first few weeks, they call it ‘poor referencing’.

Encouraging attendance

The conversation moved to the library training environment, where we often have an opportunity to see people only once face to face. Students need to get feedback on the quizzes – there might not be anything after that.

There is nothing telling the students they have to go to these sessions apart from them thinking it might be helpful. So how do we leverage off a one off teaching slot? In that one off session – eg: ‘How can you become an expert in 10 minutes’ – can we replicate that type of activity online in the same sort of way?

Suggestions for encouraging attendance included:

  • Doing this as part of something for someone they respect.
  • Provide students the materials in the live sessions eg: worksheets and reading and exercises, then collect them into a coherent ebook, step by step.
  • Give them a certificate at the end – shake their hands and give it to them.

Getting university buy-in

Tom suggested that it is a good idea to tap into the national standard for what a student needs to do in a particular area. Each department will have their own way of doing it.

He suggested going to the international standardised skills framework, finding the skill that is relevant, and using the text describing this to be part of the course outline. Accrediting bodies in some areas will be useful for this (for example Engineering). You can use the description from this body. Doing this makes it easier to get a course approved. The Executive of institutions will support that kind of course.

Examples include the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), which  is a computer science based set, and there is the Seoul Accord.

Online course technologies

Cambridge University uses the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment, which Tom noted is the equivalent of buying a Vauxhall – can buy lots of parts and find lots of people to fix it. It is not very exciting. But it is fine.

Moodle is not really built for creating an ePortfolio which shows evidence the students know how to use something. They collect material into your e-portfolio and then you present it. Use simple social media where you say “please work on this and discuss it”. This can shows evidence the student knows how to use something. One tool is the Mahara open source ePortfolio program.

Recording technology

Recording lectures is a challenge at Cambridge where there are not universal recording facilities in lecture theatres. But Tom noted that while sometimes having good technology can be useful – a document camera can show students how equations are done for example – using simple tools can work.

If you are giving a presentation, simply set a recording device on the desk. Students really like the recordings of a presentation. Tom noted that when recording something to go online is it much easier to give a presentation to a live audience rather than to an empty room. Note it is important to consider the legal issues of recording people – when they approach you to speak privately about something you need to turn the microphone off. It is also important to remember to repeat questions asked by the audience into the microphone.

Recording helps international students. They listen to the recording a minimum of six times. If use echo360 active learning program you can see how many views each part of the course is being looked at.

People are prepared to listen for 6-20 minutes. When putting recordings online you can have a talking head or show the powerpoint slides. A good way of presenting a video recording is to show a talking head for the first few seconds to see a human, then flip to powerpoint slides then have the human again at the end. An alternative is to just use a static photograph. People will treat a smiley face as a person.

Tom noted that he has never been to a webinar session at university that worked properly. You spend half the time trying to get the technology to work. It is necessary to train people in the technology. Unless there is a need for a live session don’t do it. Digital native young people still have trouble with the technology.

Examples of good online teaching

Universities UK have Open Learn and the Australian equivalent is Open 2 Study. The way these are set up – you do a short course for free then you can enrol in the longer one for a cost. The courses all started at 12 weeks, and they are now four weeks. MIT have created Open EdX.

Other useful links:

* About the speaker

Tom Worthington, is an independent computer consultant and educator. He is an Adjunct lecturer in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University and a member of the ANU Climate Change and Energy Change Institutes. Also Tom designs and teaches on-line courses for the the Australian Computer Society (ACS) Virtual College. He was previously an IT policy advisor at the Australian Department of Defence. Tom is a Past President, Honorary Life Member and Fellow of the ACS, as well as a voting member of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Published 23 July 2015
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley
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