The cloud is the library, according to a Dutch think tank

Every four years, the scientific technical council of the Dutch SURF foundation publishes a trend report. Aim of this report is to chart the main trends in IT that will affect institutions of higher education over the near future. Main themes of this year’s report are the cloud and the trend that users are increasingly looking for and creating their own solutions with what’s available on the web itself.

The report is, unfortunately, only available in Dutch at this page.

I was particularly interested in the chapter on academic libraries written by John Mackenzie Owen and Leo Plugge.

Their basic premise is that scholarly information has increasingly moved to the cloud and that the Open Access share of that scholarly information is increasing. Combined, these two trends have profound consequences for academic libraries.

At the same time, there are some interesting challenges for students and scholars in this new world in the cloud. Search skills are becoming more and more important. There is not yet a clear solution for OA author fees. New forms of publishing are emerging, so called enhanced publications that also call for new skills, among which legal skills when it comes to reuse of objects. The uncontrolled proliferation in available data sets that is a chaos at the moment.

Collections, that were at the core of the academic library, have moved to the cloud and, with OA on the rise, increasingly open available. The library, nor the library web site is no longer the first stop in students’ and scholars’ quests for information. Libraries will have a role when it comes to curating historical print material, in supporting subject fields that are only slowly digitizing like humanities (although I think digital humanities initiatives are building up critical mass very fast now), and, thirdly, as a ‘living room’ for undergraduate students.

Examples of users taking the lead in finding their own solutions are ArXive, the Web, Google, PLoS, and Mendeley. And it is true that all these initiatives started in research institutions and universities. A far more important trend, I think, is that students and scholars are no longer dependent on their institution when it comes to creating and publishing content collaboratively. Hardware is becoming cheaper and cheaper, internet access is ubiquitous and the web is rife with free services that can act as an alternative to solutions traditionally offered by the IT department, like a learning management system.

An interesting observation is that Dutch universities spend proportionally more on their libraries (+3 percent of their budget) that US universities (-2 percent). I am not sure whether it is possible to make such a sweeping statement, but the implication seems to be that there’s an opportunity for Dutch universities to save money. Money that could be used to support scholars in OA publishing, for instance.

The chapter concludes with stating that the cloud is the new library. It is also recommended that SURF organizes a vision group, in which (advanced) users are strongly represented, to see how a Dutch node in this cloud could be built. The cloud though, I'd guess, doesn’t stop at borders.

ARL white paper on research libraries and MOOCs

ARL has released a 15 page white paper on “Massive Open Online Courses: Legal and Policy Issues for Research Libraries”

The executive summary is rather concise:

“Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) raise significant legal and policy questions forresearch libraries, which are often asked to support the development of MOOC courses.These questions involve information policy concerns that are central to researchlibraries, including the proper application of fair use, the transition to open access as thedefault mode of scholarly publishing, and the provision of equal access to learningmaterials for students with and without disabilities. Where possible, research librariesshould engage in conversations around MOOCs and promote their core values. Bydoing so, they will also promote the continuing vitality of libraries as partners in theeducational mission.”

Hopefully, all these legal issues will not put libraries in the role of road block in the development of MOOCs.

Also, I think it would be interesting to consider how MOOCs could play a role in further education for library staff. Especially so called cMOOCs seem highly fit for developing staff skills in fast changing environments. But then the ARL white paper only seems to know about xMOOCs.

Yesterday a badge, today a certificate

The certificate is for finishing the Google Power Search Course. Actually I finished it last week but assessments could be taken until a few days ago. It was Google first attempt at a MOOC and they did quite a nice job. You can still view all the material and browse the forums and view some Google+ hangouts with search experts that were recorded but it's no longer possible to do the assessments anymore and, thereby, earning the certificate. I suggested in the final evaluation that Google should consider making the course anytime, anywhere available.

The certificate looks nice:

Got my self a badge!

And it really was for looking at an extended commercial for Google Apps for business - and, of course, answering some questions about that commercial.

Nevertheless, ALISON has an interesting approach when it comes to e-learning.

MOOC Infographic

Very nice infographic about MOOCs from Online Colleges:


Presented By: Online Colleges

Elsevier and Dutch Royal Library testing private access to articles

Two days ago, May 29, the Dutch Royal Library published a press release (in Dutch only) in which it announces an experiment with Elsevier to give private persons and independent researchers ‘cheap’ access to about 2.5 million articles in about 400 Elsevier journals, mainly medical ones. Cheap means a price of 6.50 euro per article. The experiment is scheduled to run until the end of the year. Should the test turn out to be successful, Elsevier and the Royal Library may decide to continue and expand the service.

An interesting experiment. Obviously, Elsevier is confident that it can segregate this market from the profitable university library market, and, more importantly in this case, the corporate library market, at least in the Netherlands, for now. Strange though that the Elsevier website doesn’t mention this news anywhere, at least yet.

Unfortunately, the press release does not mention how success of the test will be measured. A simple test would be profitability and it should not be too hard to score on that one. The cost of setting up the search engine for the Elsevier journals that are already hosted on the Royal Library’s servers should be marginal, so with a couple of thousand articles sold, the service would already be a success. Nevertheless, marketing of such a new service takes time and 7 months for this experiment seems to be short.

But there might also so be a more strategic goal behind the experiment. It looks to me that Elsevier is sort of creating an alternative road for cheap access to specific user groups, much like their program for developing countries. This can then be used as an argument in the ongoing open access debate, much like: Look, we poor publishers are only saying that publishing costs a lot of money, and see, we are doing our very best to create affordable access options for poorer customer groups.

New Ithaka report: Barriers to the adoption of online learning

Just today,  Ithaka released a new report under the title “Barriers to the adoption of online learning in U.S. higher education".

From the blurb on the Ithaka site:

“This Ithaka S+R report is a landscape review of important developments in online learning today.  It is the first in a series that will provide leaders in higher education with lessons learned from existing online learning efforts to help accelerate productive use of these systems in the future.  The goal of this research was to understand what benefits colleges and universities expect from online learning technologies, what barriers they face in implementing them, and how these technologies might be best shaped to serve different types of institutions.”

I just finished reading the report and must say that I am totally unimpressed. And surprised, the quality of Ithaka reports is usually quite high.

There are three main issues I have with the report.

There is nothing much new to be learned from their analysis of the current state of e-learning in higher education. The obstacles to the implementation of online learning that are discussed in the report have been known for a long time now, and, by consequence, the strategies mentioned for overcoming these barriers should be well known by HE administrators.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that the report is about e-learning systems that are not yet here. The authors coin the phrase Interactive Learning Online (ILO) to differentiate such a system from our current, poorly used and poorly performing, learning management systems. An ILO system, or platform, is different in that it would use largely machine-guided learning, data-driven, adaptive and customized to individual students, that would also assist instructors in delivering targeted guidance. One of the report’s recommendations is for a national, system-wide initiative to develop such a platform. Instead of a new initiative, I think it would be much wiser to support the open source communities around Moodle and Sakai in order to capitalize on their vast experience with systems that have been actually deployed for some time now.

Also, the authors call for educational content that can easily be customized and adapted by faculty. We used to call that the not-invented-here syndrome, ten years ago, and of course the argument is still valid and the obstacle is a very real one. As with the software development issue, I would at least have expected the authors to mention Open Educational Resources as a possible solution to this problem.