Topic: Cross-institutional collaboration
Blog Post
January 21, 2016
Love and Measurement: Online Learning in Small, Independent Colleges
Dr. Robert Wachter, professor and interim chairman of the department of medicine, University of California, San Francisco, wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times on January 17 in which he argues that measurement in both the health care and education industries has failed us. He concludes by saying, “The secret of quality is love.” He worried that our efforts to measure and improve quality somehow block the altruism that motivates both doctors and teachers to do their…
Blog Post
January 19, 2016
Religious Studies Project Launch and Training Workshop
My colleague Roger Schonfeld and I launched the religious studies project at Pitts Theology Library at Emory University on January 7 and 8 with the first of two methods training workshops for our institutional collaborators. With funding from lead sponsor the American Theological Library Association (ATLA), as well as the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL) and the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the religious studies project brings together local research teams from eighteen higher education institutions to investigate the…
Blog Post
December 22, 2015
Looking at the Research Needs of Religious Studies Scholars
This fall, Ithaka S+R announced plans for a series of new projects to examine the research practices of scholars in three diverse fields. These projects are being conducted in close partnership with scholarly societies and libraries and will provide valuable insight for libraries and other service providers of research support services. I am writing today with an update of the strong progress we are making on the first…
Blog Post
November 18, 2015
Understanding the Role of the Office of Scholarly Communication
Scholarly communication has become a standard feature of academic and research libraries, and a number of research libraries have established an office of scholarly communication as one of its organizational units. Harvard Library established an Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) when the Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed the open access policy that would be followed by the other schools and institutes of Harvard. The OSC was meant to help the Harvard schools implement open access. The provost’s office at…
Research Report
November 18, 2015
Office of Scholarly Communication
Scope, Organizational Placement, and Planning in Ten Research Libraries
The phrase “scholarly communication” appears often in the description of library roles and responsibilities, but the function is still new enough that it takes different forms in different institutions. There is no common understanding of where it fits into the library’s organizational structure. This landscape review of offices of scholarly communication grows out of research originally conducted by Ithaka S+R for the Harvard Library. Dr. Sarah Thomas, Vice President for the Harvard Library, University Librarian and Roy E. Larsen Librarian…
Blog Post
November 16, 2015
Having the “Online Learning Discussion” with Faculty
Ithaka S+R has been working with the Council of Independent Colleges for nearly two years in creating a consortium for online learning in the humanities. We have written extensively about the project, in a previous blog post, a report on the findings after the first year of the program, and a case study in which we featured a few faculty from the project and their experiences with the program. Last week, the Council of Independent Colleges held…
Blog Post
November 4, 2015
A New Frontier for Online Learning
Upper Level Humanities Courses at Small Colleges
As students and their families have become increasingly value-conscious, and competition has heated up, the presidents of small, independent colleges have had to find ways to reduce costs, increase enrollments, or both. These pressures have often meant curricular changes. The humanities have been hit hard by these trends. As the number of humanities majors has declined, small colleges have struggled to maintain a robust humanities course catalog—and, in particular, a set of needed upper-level courses—for the majors that remain. The…
Case Study
November 4, 2015
Leveraging Technology for the Liberal Arts
The Council of Independent Colleges Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction
The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), created in 1956, is a membership organization of nearly 700 independent, non-profit colleges and universities. The organization exists to support college and university leadership, advance institutional excellence, and enhance public understanding of private higher education’s contributions to society. To achieve these goals, CIC hosts and develops programs, seminars, and conferences that help institutions improve the quality of education, administrative and financial performance, and institutional visibility. Economic pressures have forced presidents of independent colleges to…
Blog Post
November 3, 2015
The Shiny New Thing
As libraries make the transition from print to digital, needs arise that are not easily accommodated in the traditional organizational structure. Librarians are generally inclusive, and they have been generous in their acceptance of the organizations that spring up to fill gaps. In the post-World War II era, numerous resource-sharing and interlibrary loan programs were created to make it easier for researchers to gain access to the library materials they needed. National microfilming programs were launched to provide broad access…
Blog Post
October 20, 2015
Can Online Courses Make Humanities Courses More Accessible in Small, Independent Colleges?
The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, established a Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction in 2014. Twenty-one colleges that constituted the consortium agreed to develop online or hybrid courses that could be shared by all participants in the consortium and had three major goals for this project: To provide an opportunity for CIC member institutions to build their capacity for online humanities instruction and share their successes with other liberal arts colleges. To…
Blog Post
October 20, 2015
Online Learning Markets: Inter-Institutional Challenges
In my last blog post, I described some of the challenges that must be addressed in the institutional context if online learning technologies are going to have maximum impact on the way registered students at existing institutions learn and on the costs associated with that instruction. The barriers described in that post are intra-institutional in nature: faculty concerns, addressing teaching specialization, governance, and cost management. In this post, I want to address important inter-institutional challenges to a robust “business-to-business”…
Blog Post
August 26, 2015
Improving Instruction at Scale
In 2008, John Immerwahr described an “iron triangle” constraining colleges and universities, in which cost, quality, and access exist in an “unbreakable reciprocal relationship, such that any change in one will inevitably impact the others.” According to this logic, making a college or university more accessible or trying to increase the quality of instruction would necessarily drive up institutional costs. Conversely, reducing expenditures would inevitably make an institution less accessible and undermine the quality of the education that a…
Case Study
August 26, 2015
Breaking the Iron Triangle at The University of Central Florida
Scanning the social needs and economic realities faced by institutions of higher education in 2008, John Immerwahr described an “iron triangle” constraining colleges and universities. Immerwahr suggested that the three points of this triangle—cost, quality, and access—exist in an “unbreakable reciprocal relationship, such that any change in one will inevitably impact the others.” According to this logic, making a college or university more accessible or trying to increase the quality of instruction would necessarily drive up institutional costs. Conversely, reducing…
Blog Post
July 13, 2015
Designing and Governing Library Collaborations
I was recently recalling a fantastic study by Ralph Wagner on The History of the Farmington Plan. It reviewed some of the most important efforts at collaboration among the US research libraries, especially in the post-war period, and analyzed their successes and eventual demise. I thought of this book as I was wondering if anyone has done a serious examination of collaboration in research university libraries. Cultures of collaboration, and their reflection in organizational design and governance, were on…
Blog Post
July 13, 2015
The Student Swirl Becoming More of a Norm in Higher Ed
The concept of the “student swirl” was conceived in the 1980s to describe undergraduates who moved among institutions before earning a bachelor’s degree. Students who transferred often did so because they made a poor initial match with an institution, or encountered academic or financial problems along the way. But now there is a growing body of evidence that students might be making a deliberate choice to transfer institutions as part of their pathway to a bachelor’s degree. First there is…
Blog Post
July 1, 2015
Promising Directions for K-12 and Community College Partnerships
My colleague Derek Wu recently wrote about dual enrollment programs and the promise they hold for improving outcomes, especially for underserved students. These programs, which allow students to earn college credits while still enrolled in high school, are just one of many forms that partnerships between K-12 systems and postsecondary institutions can take. Two and four-year postsecondary institutions across the nation have created partnerships with local K-12 districts, sharing resources, aligning curricula, and coordinating support services in order to…
Blog Post
July 10, 2012
The Kanazawa Institute of Technology’s Library Roundtable Reaches a Milestone
Nearly every library recognizes the importance of global collaboration, but did you know that there is a Japan-US library program that has been operating for 30 years? The Kanazawa Institute of Technology’s Library Roundtable celebrated its 30th anniversary last week, and I had the pleasure of taking part in the program. The Japan-US library program started as a thank-you gesture from the director, Dr. Sakai of the KIT Library, who served as deputy director of the National Diet Library after…
Research Report
July 26, 2006
Software and Collaboration in Higher Education
A Study of Open Source Software
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…