Publications

Far too many students in the United States start their postsecondary education without being able to demonstrate the skills and knowledge deemed necessary to succeed in college-level math. Colleges and universities have traditionally dealt with this problem by placing students in full-semester developmental courses for which they must pay full tuition but do not receive college credit. It has become clear, however, that this approach has serious drawbacks, as students who start out in remediation are far less likely to…

Summary of Findings This report provides our preliminary analysis of evidence generated from the planning period and first iteration of CIC Consortium courses. It includes a summary of our findings, followed by a description and presentation of a good portion of the data for those interested in delving deeper. It is important to note that these courses finished very recently, and we (like the faculty members involved) are still processing what we have learned. We have amassed a considerable mass…

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…

Online technologies show promise for educating more people in innovative ways that can lower costs for universities and colleges, but how can higher education leaders move forward, confident in their choices about how best to integrate these technologies on their campuses? With a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Ithaka S+R is working to help provide the answer. Since November 2012, Ithaka S+R has been working with the University System of Maryland (USM) to test a variety of…

Rebecca Griffiths explores an intriguing and potentially high impact application of online learning: MOOCs in the Classroom? What happens when faculty are encouraged to adapt MOOCs intended for large global audiences for use in traditional classroom settings and curriculum? Can this “off label use” bring benefits like improved learning outcomes or the ability to educate more students in a given course? How can institutions make informed, evidence-based choices about the use of these technology enabled courses on their own campuses?

The challenges of digitizing, preserving and providing access to over 1,000 years’ worth of material held by The National Archives (TNA) are considerable. In recent years, TNA has developed a strategy to digitize content quickly though its Licensed Internet Associates program. These commercial partnerships, closely managed by TNA staff, have allowed the institution to digitize millions of pages of material at minimal direct cost. This case study explores the model developed by TNA in light of the opportunities that commercial…

There is no single formula that Online Academic Resources (OARs) can apply to achieve sustainability, no ‘one-size-fits-all’ plan that any organization can follow to reach a point of financial stability. There are, however, a variety of processes and approaches that can help to improve the likelihood of entrepreneurial success.  In an age when traditional content producers – including scholarly publishers and newspapers – struggle to maintain their financial footing in face of the challenges of the digital world, OARs cannot…

Scholars have a vast range of opportunities to distribute their work, from setting up web pages or blogs, to posting articles to working paper websites or institutional repositories, to including them in peer-reviewed journals or books. In American colleges and universities, access to the internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous; consequently nearly all intellectual effort results in some form of “publishing.” Yet universities do not treat this function as an important, mission-centric endeavor. The result has been a scholarly…

In a series of projects, we were asked by JSTOR to examine scholarly communication practices in various disciplines. The goals of this work were to understand how research is conducted and disseminated in select disciplines, and to identify the importance of different scholarly resources. In this project, we focused on the field of history.

Over the years, open source software (OSS) projects have been launched among higher education institutions with the aim of meeting the community’s needs more effectively and at less cost than do commercial options presently available. However, many in the community believe that uncertainty about future support and improvements hinders the widespread adoption of open source software. The creation of a new organization, which we refer to with the generic term “OOSS” (Organization for Open Source Software), has been proposed to…

This report summarizes what we learned about the evolving environment for digital printing and electronic distribution technologies, and how these technologies are impacting the academic press community. It attempts to weave together a wide range of perspectives into a coherent picture of the opportunities and challenges created by digital technologies for scholarly presses. It is based primarily on interviews with press directors, press staff, and other stakeholders who offered valuable perspectives on the academic publishing industry.