Bridging the gap between service provision and customer expectation

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to serve as a reminder to all managers that they must understand their customers, from the customers’ perspective, and not make assumptions about customer needs. Design/methodology/approach: Customer Value Discovery workshops are held with undergraduate on-campus students and academic staff at Nottingham Trent University to identify customer values and irritations. Library staff participate in the workshops and vote as they expected their customers to vote. The gaps identified between staff assumptions of customer perceptions of service importance and performance serve as a catalyst for staff engagement in the change process that is necessary to deliver on the value propositions and reduce customer irritations. Findings: Library staff assumptions of customer perceptions were not always accurate. The gaps identified helped to engage staff in the change process that was necessary to improve perceptions of value and to reduce irritations. By explicitly addressing the value propositions with the aims of adding value and reducing irritation, student satisfaction with library services, as measured by two independent satisfaction surveys, improved considerably. Research limitations/implications: The research is based on two customer segments of one university library. The research should be repeated after a gap of three-four years to check if the value propositions and irritations have changed in that time. If so, the goals of the library’s operational plan would have to change to reflect the new value propositions

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Martin Oliver (ed.), Innovation in the Evaluation of Learning Technology, London: University of North London, 1998. ISBN: 1–85377–256–9. Softback, 242 pages, £15.00

Faculty Use Of Open Educational Resources: Attitudes, Norms, And Self-Efficacy As Behavioral Predictors.

The primary drivers of open educational practices, open educational resources (OER), and OER enabled pedagogy are the faculty who will help transform higher education in these domains. The purpose of this study was to understand factors that lead faculty to use OER and to learn how their use is related to teaching behaviors. It is broadly based on an OER Research Hub hypothesis that the use of OER leads to critical reflection by the educator with evidence of improvement in their practices. Within that hypothesis is the suggestion that the use of OER causes faculty to incorporate a wider range of content, consider different teaching approaches and reflect on their practices as an educator. In this study, the components of this hypothesis are dissected by directly measuring faculty teaching and reflective practices and using the components of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to explain factors that contributed to the behavior. This research looks at faculty perceived attitudes towards OER, their subjective norms of peers, and their self-efficacy in teaching as determinants of behavior. This yields three research questions. What are the attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control of faculty in relation to three behaviors: use of OER to prepare for instruction, use of OER within a course, and reflective practices. Higher education faculty in the United States were surveyed (n=414) using questions adapted from the Attitude Towards Open Education Resources (ATOER), the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES), and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). Data were analyzed using univariate and multivariate regression. The findings show the impact that OER use has on how teaching faculty change the way they prepare for classes, the way they engage with students in the classroom, and the way they reflect on their teaching. When looked at independently, attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control each significantly explained the use of OER in preparing for instruction and reflective practices. Perceived behavioral control was not significant in explaining use of OER in a course. Multivariate models incorporating all three of the major constructs of the TPB, found the models to be a significant predictors of use of OER in preparing for instruction, use of OER in a course, and faculty reflective practice. However, in both the univariate and the multivariate models, the amount of variance explained was very low, with there being no explanation above 20%. The findings also identified the need for interventions that facilitate transformative teaching using OER. A deeper understanding of the faculty who use OER and the factors related to OER that influence faculty practices is an important contribution to the research

Understanding innovation and policy transfer: implications for libraries and information services in Africa

Library development in Africa has involved large-scale processes of innovation and policy transfer, also referred to as policy borrowing or policy learning. A good deal of theory has been developed in various disciplines to study these processes. This has not been applied in library and information services (LIS) to any significant extent, but it can help us to gain a better understanding of why attempts to transfer new ideas fail, how to select the ideas we want to transfer, and how to improve the chances of successful innovation and policy transfer. This paper places policy transfer within the broader framework of the diffusion of innovations before considering what we can learn from the theory of policy transfer and related processes, with emphasis on theory developed in comparative education. An attempt is made to apply these insights to library development in Africa and draw some lessons for African library decision makers. Some of the examples are drawn from the author’s experience in the South African library profession.published or submitted for publicationOpe