Loans, logins and lasting the course: Academic library use and student retention

Activities and services that improve student engagement and retention in the higher education sector are important not only to individual student’s success but also to university planning and funding. This paper reports on a quantitative study that was carried out to explore whether use of the library by new university students is associated with continued enrolment. Students’ socioeconomic background and age were also examined in relation to library use. Limited to commencing students in March 2010 at Curtin University, the study drew on demographic data from the University’s enrolment system and instances of library use from the Library’s management system. Results of the statistical analyses indicate that library use is associated with retention, and importantly, library use in the early weeks of a student’s first semester is associated with retention. ‘Mature aged’ (21 years and over) students displayed different library use patterns than their younger colleagues and there was some variation in library use between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Findings from this study suggest that academic libraries can contribute to the retention of students and that carefully targeted programs and services may improve library use by some groups of students

Specification By Example for Educational Purposes

The Specification By Example (SBE) is a guideline for building the right software, a software that meets customer requirements. It is based on seven process patterns and enhances communication and collaboration and it usually is used in agile software development. The connection between education and agile software development sounds actually as an emergent topic. In this paper, we propose to structure a teaching approach in analogy to an agile software developement by transposing each process pattern of SBE to acorresponding one in the teaching domain. Moreover, we show that thanks to the emergence of a collective intelligence process, the students are more confident and more responsible. Such a course offers the opportunity to learn not only technical skills, but also some values in a new mindset