Assessing the Data Management Needs of Academic Researchers

This was part of a panel presentation given with Lizzy Rolando, Georgia Tech. If properly documented, preserved, and made accessible, datasets can serve not only as the raw material underlying books and journal articles but also as stand-alone outputs of scholarly research. Academic librarians, with a long history of being stewards of scholarly documents, are increasingly taking up the task of being stewards of research data. Developing services that support research data management requires input from stakeholders across campus--faculty and student researchers, librarians, information technology experts, and other support staff. In our presentation we will discuss and reflect on recent efforts at Emory University to gather that input, including (1) identifying and collaborating with campus partners, (2) administering a campus-wide survey of faculty practices and perspectives on research data management, and (3) conducting in-depth interviews with individual researchers about their data management needs. We will discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with this type of assessment, our approaches to analyzing and synthesizing findings from different components of our assessment, and our plans for disseminating our findings across campus and to the greater academic community

Impact of integrating OER in teacher education at the Open University of Sri Lanka

This chapter reports on a research project implemented in the Faculty of Education at the Open University of Sri Lanka (OUSL) which investigated the impact of integrating Open Educational Resources (OER) in the teaching-learning process by secondarylevel student teachers in Sri Lanka. The research questions this study seeks to answer are: What are the impacts of OER integration on the use of instructional materials by teachers? What are the impacts of OER integration on teachers’ pedagogical perspectives? What are the impacts of OER integration on teachers’ pedagogical practices? The study adopted a design-based research approach. An intervention programme was implemented with 230 participants who were student teachers registered in the OUSL Postgraduate Diploma in Education programme in nine OUSL centres across the nine provinces of Sri Lanka. Data were collected at multiple stages through the following quantitative and qualitative strategies: survey questionnaires, analysis of lesson plans, concept mapping, self-reflection, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, usage data from the learning management system and narratives in the form of “stories”. While descriptive statistical methods such as percentages were used to analyse the quantitative data, the authors employed an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis approach to analyse the qualitative data. Findings showed that the integration of OER had a substantial impact on changing teachers’ instructional resource use, pedagogical perspectives and pedagogical practices. The careful and systematic design of activities facilitated a shift from a “low” to a “high” degree of innovative use of instructional resources as well as creation of OER by teachers, while their pedagogical perspectives and practices shifted towards more constructivist, context-centric and collaborative patterns, as well as to a participatory and sharing culture, in favour of Open Educational Practices

Disciplinary differences in faculty research data management practices and perspectives

Academic librarians are increasingly engaging in data curation by providing infrastructure (e.g., institutional repositories) and offering services (e.g., data management plan consultations) to support the management of research data on their campuses. Efforts to develop these resources may benefit from a greater understanding of disciplinary differences in research data management needs. After conducting a survey of data management practices and perspectives at our research university, we categorized faculty members into four research domains—arts and humanities, social sciences, medical sciences, and basic sciences—and analyzed variations in their patterns of survey responses. We found statistically significant differences among the four research domains for nearly every survey item, revealing important disciplinary distinctions in data management actions, attitudes, and interest in support services. Serious consideration of both the similarities and dissimilarities among disciplines will help guide academic librarians and other data curation professionals in developing a range of data-management services that can be tailored to the unique needs of different scholarly researchers

Nursing Faculty Perspectives on Support in Technology, Learning Management Systems, and Self-efficacy

Past literature has shown that nursing programs reported educators were at the novice or beginner level regarding use of technology and that there was a critical need for faculty development. There was a lack of current information on the perspectives of nurse faculty utilizing learning management systems. Learning management systems are being used within nursing education, faculty should be proficient implementing the technology, if not, students and faculty suffer. The purpose of this study was to understand how nursing faculty perceive the use and support for integrated online Learning Management System (LMS) technology, along with levels of self-efficacy, at the institution in which they work. The Bandura self-efficacy conceptual framework was used to explore nursing faculty perspectives on the use of LMS technology. A case study approach was used for this study to aid in identifying the perspective of nursing educators who have utilized LMS technology. Participants included 8 nursing faculty from 3 Southeastern Pennsylvania nursing program. Data sources consisted of online survey questions and telephone interviews. Survey data results were analyzed by means of central tendency. Transcriptions of interviews were analyzed using NVivo software for coding and identification of themes and patterns. The results revealed that nursing faculty did not seem to like their LMS platform; however, the majority of the faculty did consider the LMSs useful in providing materials to students and for posting grades, although faculty stated a desire for additional training and regular workshops on using LMSs. This research can contribute to positive social change by assisting stakeholders in best implementation of LMSs in student instructional practices

Piloting a Community of Student Data Consultants that Supports and Enhances Research Data Services

Research ecosystems within university environments are continuously evolving and requiring more resources and domain specialists to assist with the data lifecycle. Typically, academic researchers and professionals are overcommitted, making it challenging to be up-to-date on recent developments in best practices of data management, curation, transformation, analysis, and visualization. Recently, research groups, university core centers, and Libraries are revitalizing these services to fill in the gaps to aid researchers in finding new tools and approaches to make their work more impactful, sustainable, and replicable. In this paper, we report on a student consultation program built within the University Libraries, that takes an innovative, student-centered approach to meeting the research data needs in a university environment while also providing students with experiential learning opportunities. This student program, DataBridge, trains students to work in multi-disciplinary teams and as student consultants to assist faculty, staff, and students with their real-world, data-intensive research challenges. Centering DataBridge in the Libraries allows students the unique opportunity to work across all disciplines, on problems and in domains that some students may not interact with during their college careers. To encourage students from multiple disciplines to participate, we developed a scaffolded curriculum that allows students from any discipline and skill level to quickly develop the essential data science skill sets and begin contributing their own unique perspectives and specializations to the research consultations. These students, mentored by Informatics faculty in the Libraries, provide research support that can ultimately impact the entire research process. Through our pilot phase, we have found that DataBridge enhances the utilization and openness of data created through research, extends the reach and impact of the work beyond the researcher’s specialized community, and creates a network of student “data champions” across the University who see the value in working with the Library. Here, we describe the evolution of the DataBridge program and outline its unique role in both training the data stewards of the future with regard to FAIR data practices, and in contributing significant value to research projects at Virginia Tech. Ultimately, this work highlights the need for innovative, strategic programs that encourage and enable real-world experience of data curation, data analysis, and data publication for current researchers, all while training the next generation of researchers in these best practices. [This paper is a conference pre-print presented at IDCC 2020 after lightweight peer review.

Responsible management education in Egyptian public business schools: Are academics ready?

Purpose – This paper focuses on three out of the 24 public business schools in Egypt in order to investigate how responsible management education is perceived and exercised by academics there. Design/ methodology/ approach – A total of 168 academics were contacted and interviewed in 42 focus groups. The length of each focus group was about 45 minutes, and interviews were conducted in Arabic as most respondents have no mastery of the English language. The authors used thematic analysis to extract the main ideas in the transcripts. Findings – Based on data analysis of the perceptions of academics concerning business education, research and management process at the target business schools, the authors of this paper found that responsible management education is not considered a priority in the work agendas of the three Egyptian public business schools. Besides a lack of general acceptance and awareness of the need for responsible management education, there are functional, procedural and edu-academic barriers that these schools need to overcome first before proceeding with implementation and expecting positive outcomes. Research limitations/ implications – This research maybe subject to criticism because the authors address only the perspectives of academics in the chosen business schools while neglecting other academic partners, particularly those in managerial positions, such as rectors and heads of departments. Future researchers may use the same research questions to investigate a managerial level perspective to depict a more holistic picture of the situation. Moreover, including Egyptian private business schools may also enrich the findings. In fact, the authors suggest that scholars from different academic disciplines such as sustainability management, business ethics, higher education, sustainability and cultural diversity work together to produce more interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research on the global responsibility themes business schools have to manage. Practical implications – If the administration of the addressed business schools seek to implement responsible management education, they should overcome the following barriers. Firstly, the functional barrier (the limited financial budget and need for official approval to address both sociocultural and environmental aspects). Secondly, procedural barriers (lack of channels for formal and/or informal collaborations with governmental bodies, private enterprises, NGOs and social activist groups). Thirdly, Edu-academic barriers (lack of CSR inclusion in business school strategy, faculty promotion and incentives not tied to their proactive embedding of sustainable development and other socio-cultural issues into their curricula, research and academic practices, and no incentive or support for interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary collaboration with researchers and faculty from other departments and faculties). Originality/ value – This paper contributes by filling a gap in sustainability, HR management, business ethics, and higher education literature in which empirical studies on responsible management education and the responsible practices of academics have been limited so fa

Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2021

The Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey has tracked the changing research, teaching, and publishing practices of faculty members within higher education triennially since early digital transformation at the turn of the century. This project has aimed to provide actionable findings to help colleges and universities, among other relevant stakeholders such as academic libraries, learned societies, and scholarly publishers, make evidence-based decisions for their planning and strategy. Against the backdrop of the global pandemic and its numerous impacts to many different facets of higher education, this eighth cycle of the survey once again queried faculty nationally on topics such as scholarly discovery and access, data management, research dissemination, and the value of the library. We also added new questions on key areas of interest, including equitable and holistic teaching practices, instructional support, perspectives on scholarly outputs and open access models, as well as on faculty capacity and evaluation. Our key findings below highlight the most notable results from the 2021 US Faculty Survey. ▪Faculty are according less importance to a journal’s impact factor whendeciding where to publish their scholarly research. Despite this decrease, faculty members continue to emphasize the importance of characteristics that have historically beenmost highly valued that help contribute towards favorable scholarly incentives, such as ajournal’s content area and high readership. ▪While faculty members continue to view the library’s most important function to be that of buyer of scholarly resources, they consider the library’s role inproviding direct support to students as essential. This includes the library’s provision of access to technology and informal learning spaces. Faculty members continue to endorse the role of the library primarily as a buyer of scholarly resources needed for their research and teaching and generally as a primary support for student learning. ▪Faculty members continue to be interested in an open access publication modeland see their library as key in financially supporting open access infrastructure. Faculty members want the library’s involvement in financially supporting an open access system and are specifically open to their college or university library investing in open journal platforms and infrastructure to do so. ▪Very few faculty members believe there are adequate processes in place to protect against research fraud, and there is widespread support for additionalefforts to ensure research integrity. While the majority of respondents do not believe that fraud is growing, they are not sanguine. There is strong support for dataset deposit,disclosure of funding sources, and registering research questions prior to analysis. ▪The disruptions of recent years have yielded a substantial increase in the use and creation of open educational resources (OER), textbooks, course modules,and video lectures. Despite increased creation and usage of OER, faculty are less interested in creating and using them for their courses as incentives for integrating OER into instructional approaches have not changed since 2018. ▪In the aggregate, the importance of the monograph has declined. The print monograph is decreasing in importance across all disciplines. Among humanists, a growingshare compared with 2018 indicated that electronic monographs are important for theirteaching and research. ▪Notwithstanding the disruptions of recent years, faculty members report thatattending conferences and workshops remains the most important way theykeep up to date with their current field. With conferences transferring to digitaloptions during the global pandemic, they remain just as relevant to keep up with scholarlyinformation

Exploring the Changing Teaching Practices and Needs of Business Faculty at Santa Clara University

This report will present the findings and recommendations of a study designed to explore Santa Clara University (SCU) business faculty’s current and emerging undergraduate teaching practices. The study was led locally by researchers in the SCU Library, with parallel studies conducted at fourteen other institutions of higher education in the United States during the 2018-19 academic year. These studies were coordinated at the national level by Ithaka S&R, a not-for-profit research and consulting service that helps academic and cultural communities serve the public good and navigate economic, technological, and demographic change. Ithaka will publish a capstone report of major themes across all fourteen institutions in Winter 2020 and will include recommendations that libraries, universities, and business schools can use to support the changing teaching practices of their business faculty

ILR Faculty Publications 2014-15

The production of scholarly research continues to be one of the primary missions of the ILR School. During a typical academic year, ILR faculty members published or had accepted for publication over 25 books, edited volumes, and monographs, 170 articles and chapters in edited volumes, numerous book reviews. In addition, a large number of manuscripts were submitted for publication, presented at professional association meetings, or circulated in working paper form. Our faculty's research continues to find its way into the very best industrial relations, social science and statistics journals.FacultyPublications_2014_15_final.pdf: 24 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Redesigning Nursing Education: Lessons Learned from the Oregon Experience

Offers evaluation findings, lessons learned, and guidance from a coalition of community colleges and university nursing programs that offer a standard competency-based curriculum to enable students to make a seamless transition and raise skill levels