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Last week, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a recent Babson survey that found that “The most-drastic recent shift in the perceived importance of online education was at small colleges (i.e., those with fewer than 1,500 students). In 2012, 60 percent of academic leaders at small colleges said online education was strategically crucial. Now that number is 70 percent—nearly the same as at universities with more than 15,000 students.” What accounts for this shift? Practical considerations are surely a…

Students at Bowie State discuss their experience with a MOOC in this video. Much of the hype surrounding MOOCS has faded and as Steve Kolowich shows in a recent Chronicle piece, “Few people would now be willing to argue that massive open online courses are the future of higher education.” As the Babson Survey Research Group (that Kolowich cites) shows, higher ed leaders are less certain that MOOCs “are a sustainable way to offer courses,” that…

Locus of Authority deftly chronicles the emergence of shared governance as a means to further university goals, and its ossification into an end in itself and a barrier against which transformative changes crash.  As my colleague Deanna Marcum elaborates, university leaders interested in pursuing innovations in online learning and other areas have sought to evade sclerotic shared governance processes through various workarounds, such as new, agile subunits and incentive programs. Such approaches are often marginal, providing an opportunity…

Often, when discussing shared governance, we talk as if everyone is part of the system—either administrator or faculty. It is also assumed that when change does happen, it occurs through formal channels. Last year, Ithaka S+R conducted a landscape review of technology-enhanced education in ten public flagship universities. The goal of our study was to understand the online learning strategies in these institutions and to learn more about perspectives on this topic among faculty and administrators. In our multiple-day…

On January 1, Ithaka S+R launched its new Educational Transformation program, which consolidates all of our higher education initiatives into a single, more impactful program. One of the first publications from the program, in conjunction with Princeton University Press, was Locus of Authority: the Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education, by William Bowen and Eugene Tobin. Addressing one of the most important issues in higher education, the authors discuss the evolution of the concept of…

What should an undergraduate chemistry major know by the time she graduates? How can one tell if she knows it? And how can chemistry instruction be improved to ensure that more students meet those expectations? Such deceptively simple questions—for chemistry and every other discipline—have become an important focus of higher education leaders, accrediting agencies, and government. Yet many universities have struggled to develop robust processes for assessing student learning. Even when a central administration makes a serious effort to develop…

Nancy Fried Foster, with co-authors Patricia Steele, David Cronrath, and Sandra Parsons Vicchio, has a new book: The Living Library: An Intellectual Ecosystem. From the publisher’s website: The Living Library describes the evolution of one possible future for academic libraries: as laboratories for cross-disciplinary investigation. At the University of Maryland, a collaboration among the Libraries, the School of Architecture and the Department of Anthropology led to the participation of students, faculty and staff in an initiative to design a full…

Books have been published for hundreds of years, so surely there must be a clear answer to this question. But in fact, it’s not so simple, and estimates from press directors, experienced consultants, and researchers in the field vary widely—from less than $10,000 to more than $25,000 per book. Determining what it costs to produce a single high-quality digital monograph is complex, and depends on the publishing house, its practices, and even its methods for accounting. That said, understanding the…

“The New American University.”  To the outsider, or to the leader of another higher education institution, it may sound like a brash and arrogant boast.  On the inside, for a person associated with Arizona State University (ASU), it can be an aspirational expression of pride and the opportunity to take a leadership role in U.S. higher education.  ASU’s president, Michael Crow, envisions the “new American university” as one “measured not by who we exclude, but rather by who we include…

For decades and even centuries, a new academic library could be built just like any other—on the same architectural plans and with the same scholarly accommodations in mind. But today this is no longer possible. Recent years have brought dramatic changes to academic work practices such as reading, writing, and communication. The means, speed, and extent of scholarly collaboration have also undergone tremendous development. The traditional library model that has sufficed for so many years can no longer suit these…

Happy New Year! Ithaka S+R published a record number of research reports and issue briefs in 2014 on two main themes: educational transformation and libraries & scholarly communications. As the New Year begins, we would like to share these with you once more, and we hope that they provide useful guidance for your work in 2015. As always, we welcome your feedback and questions. Use the comments form below or send us a tweet @IthakaSR. Educational Transformation:…

Last year the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released a statement on the freedom to teach which asserts several rights for faculty, including the right to determine the texts and assessments within their courses. While recognizing that “common course syllabi and examinations are… typical,” the statement emphasizes that these “should not be imposed by departmental or administrative fiat.” Our newest issue brief, “Exploring the Contours of the Freedom to Teach,” considers the potential impact of AAUP’s statement on the…

Liberal arts colleges are known for low professor to student ratios, intimate seminar classes and highly personalized undergraduate experiences. On the surface, it is not obvious how online learning fits with this picture. But these days liberal arts colleges face many of the same pressures as larger universities – resource constraints, the growth of non-traditional students with more extracurricular responsibilities, even uncertainty about how a liberal arts education should evolve to stay relevant in a digital world. There is an…

Public research universities face financial, legislative, and academic pressures to increase access to higher education, make it more affordable, and improve the learning outcomes of their students. Can technology help these institutions meet these challenges? Our researchers at Ithaka S+R, with funding from Lumina Foundation, undertook a study over the course of the 2013/2014 academic year to understand the current environment for public research universities. We interviewed 214 individuals, including academic administrators, directors of online learning, chief financial officers,…

This week’s CNI meeting featured a variety of thought-provoking sessions on the digital issues facing academic libraries today, including privacy and preservation. I facilitated a session on Monday afternoon on discovery, using my recent issue brief on the topic to ask the question, “What Role(s) Should the Library Play in Support of Discovery?” While participants shared mixed views about the value of indexed discovery services at their institutions, with some expressing the sense of their real value especially…

Yesterday, I attended a symposium sponsored by Digital Science, Harvard, Microsoft, and MIT, called “Shaking It Up: How to thrive in – and change – the research ecosystem.” I made the trip to attend this event in person because I am focusing some attention on serving the sciences right now, and the sessions featured a remarkable array of mostly new initiatives in support of scientific research and scholarly communication. The opening keynote featured an appropriately pointed but ultimately inspirational…

At the Charleston Conference, Ithaka S+R hosted a session on “The Spaces Between,” which was intended to explore our communities’ needs for research that fall between the traditional boundaries of library, publisher, and vendor. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, these spaces can prove themselves to be cracks into which important issues fall unnoticed, or opportunities to build connections between communities with ultimately many shared interests. Our panel consisted of Joe Esposito, an independent publishing consultant, Susan Stearns,…

Last week, Joseph Esposito announced on The Scholarly Kitchen a new research project in partnership with Ithaka S+R to study changing channels through which publishers sell to libraries and libraries acquire from publishers. We believe that the mechanisms for book sales/acquisitions are changing to some degree, especially at smaller libraries, with real implications both for the print and digital marketplace. We are thrilled to be launching this project in partnership with Joe, and grateful to the support of The…

A couple of weeks ago, while attending the Harvard Library Visiting Committee meeting, I participated in an amazing discussion of collection development strategies. I heard Harvard librarians saying that Harvard can no longer collect everything, indeed, shouldn’t collect everything, and needed to build strong collaborative relationships so that Harvard scholars and students would be able to find the resources they need to do their work. This view—access is more important than ownership—is not new among other academic and research libraries,…

Yesterday, ACRL released the third draft of the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and called upon the community to provide additional feedback. Against this backdrop, our latest issue brief is particularly timely. In “Information Literacy and Research Practices,” Nancy Fried Foster, Ithaka S+R’s senior anthropologist, demonstrates how “researchers in the wild” are adhering to many of the goals described in the draft Framework. While recognizing that the move away from the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, in place…