This report from the Center for Studies in Higher Education makes a valuable contribution by examining how much and in what ways instructors in universities and colleges are actually using online instructional resources. It would be useful if the methodology and the survey tools were extended to other institutions. _____JH
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A “build it and they will come” approach to many university digitization initiatives has precluded systematic investigations of the demand for these resources. Those who fund and develop digital resources have identified the general lack of knowledge about the level and quality of their use in educational settings as pressing concerns.
The purpose of our research was to map the universe of digital resources available to undergraduate educators in a subset of users in the humanities and social sciences (H/SS), and to examine how understanding use and users can benefit the integration of these resources into undergraduate teaching (p. 1, Executive Summary).
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We began creating a typology by simply describing resource types (e.g., curriculum, video, maps, electronic journals, etc.) based on actual faculty discussion group data (below), thereby generating a useful map for describing digital resources from a faculty perspective. We refined the typology so that resource characteristics are gathered around “centers of value.” These centers of value (e.g., what and how content is represented, how can it be found, etc.) can function as broad yet significant guiding principles, with considerable strengths in describing many kinds of digital resources.
What we soon discovered, however, is that users, when compared to resource providers, often use a different level of granularity in defining a resource (e.g., whether they can find on the web a format, a photo, a picture, or a passage). Furthermore, categories of users often comprise diverse individuals with varying and idiosyncratic needs, perceptions, and ways of finding and utilizing digital resources.
The set of roles under the designation “owner,” (and the individuals in those roles) ordinarily have different interests, values, and, especially, different levels of access to traces of user behavior. A colleague suggested the following distinction of these roles:
• Aggregators, who select which digital resources are to be available in what combinations, and try to bring them to the attention of users
• Developers of tools, who shape user interactions, export mechanisms, and access paths
• Content creators and owners, who conceive, assemble, describe, and digitize content
(pp. 3-4 Executive Summary).
[Thanks to [eLearnopedia] for citing this resource.]
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