Building to Last: Experiences & Best Practices from a Long-Standing ETD Program

Those who support the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) program at Kansas State University have learned much since starting the journey in 2004. Organizational structures, policies and procedures, and technology have changed dramatically over the years and have made supporting ETDs through periods of change challenging but by no means insurmountable. This presentation will provide an overview of K-State’s ETD program including personnel roles, submission and review workflow, support services, preservation, and how the infrastructure has evolved over the years. K-State’s ETD program and supporting services are decentralized with various organizational units providing support in specific areas but cooperating closely to ensure the 450+ theses, dissertations, and reports created every year are processed, preserved, and made openly accessible through the K-State Research Exchange, the institutional repository. The presentation will provide key pieces of good practices related to copyright (including author rights) services, ETD licensing, formatting assistance services, and how to build and maintain support services, even in a decentralized environment. Graduate students are being asked more and more to publish prior to thesis and dissertation completion and to work closer with private industry, potentially involving corporate intellectual property and trade secrets, to be more competitive post-graduation. The presentation will touch on ways to manage risk while maintaining a commitment to open-access. The presentation will conclude with considerations for the future and possible plans for the improvement of K-State’s ETD program

Decision Utility of Productivity Indicators at the Campus Level

In today’s higher education environment, costs are increasing, tuition is increasing, subsidies are decreasing, student attrition is extensive, and global competition is increasing. These and other internal and external factors in higher education have created a mounting interest in productivity indicators, the ratio of outputs divided by inputs (Hanushek, 2007; Harris, 2010; Levin, 1993; Massy, 2011; Massy & Wilger, 1992; NCHEMS, 2010; Vedder, 2004). Leaders in higher education as well as external governing bodies are increasingly using productivity indicators to create systems of transparency and accountability. Despite the increased focus on productivity and productivity indicators, little has been done to assess the decision utility of productivity indicators for campus level decision makers. The purpose of this study was to assess the decision utility of selected instructional productivity indicators as seen by key campus level administrators. Data were collected through a survey created by the researcher from Presidents, Chief Academic Officers, Associate/Assistant Vice Presidents directly tied to teaching activities, Chief Financial Officers, and the senior member of institutional effectiveness/research offices (typically Directors of Institution Effectiveness) at nonprofit, regionally accredited higher education institutions in Tennessee. Four domains were identified to assess the decision utility of each productivity indicator: the importance for resource allocation decisions; the importance for institution trend analysis; the importance for internal accountability; and the importance for external accountability. A number of conclusions were drawn from the findings of the study. First, the lack of statistically significant differences in the importance level assigned to the any of the indicators suggested general agreement across the population about the decision utility of the indicators. Second, not only was there general agreement in the importance level assigned to the indicators, eight of the nine indicators included in the study were of relative importance to respondents and returned a scaled ranking between “Important” and “Of Strong Importance” for overall decision making. Third, although increases in staffing levels have been identified as a cause of cost increases in higher education, the primary productivity indicator of staffing, Degrees/Back Office Employee, was ranked the lowest across groups

If Only I Knew: The Stranger in the Twentieth-Century Short Story.

This study is divided into two major parts. The first explores the variations of the stranger genre in the American twentieth-century short story by examining the short works of Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O\u27Connor, Raymond Carver, and David James Duncan. The second provides five original works of fiction that represent my understanding of the genre. Observations in the first section fall into three basic categories: The Mysterious Stranger: Character, The Tough Guy: Conflict, and The Nature of Knowing: Theme. The Character in Transition chapter relates my observations in the critical study to the structure of my original fiction, while the final chapter presents five original short stories

Constructing a gazebo: supporting teamwork in a tightly coupled, distributed task in virtual reality

Many tasks require teamwork. Team members may work concurrently, but there must be some occasions of coming together. Collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) allow distributed teams to come together across distance to share a task. Studies of CVE systems have tended to focus on the sense of presence or copresence with other people. They have avoided studying close interaction between us-ers, such as the shared manipulation of objects, because CVEs suffer from inherent network delays and often have cumbersome user interfaces. Little is known about the ef-fectiveness of collaboration in tasks requiring various forms of object sharing and, in particular, the concurrent manipu-lation of objects. This paper investigates the effectiveness of supporting teamwork among a geographically distributed group in a task that requires the shared manipulation of objects. To complete the task, users must share objects through con-current manipulation of both the same and distinct at-tributes. The effectiveness of teamwork is measured in terms of time taken to achieve each step, as well as the impression of users. The effect of interface is examined by comparing various combinations of walk-in cubic immersive projection technology (IPT) displays and desktop devices

Opening Up Open Access Institutional Repositories to Demonstrate Value: Two Universities’ Pilots on Including Metadata-Only Records

Introduction: Institutional repository managers are continuously looking for new ways to demonstrate the value of their repositories. One way to do this is to create a more inclusive repository that provides reliable information about the research output produced by faculty affiliated with the institution. Description of Program: This article details two pilot projects that evaluated how their repositories could track faculty research output through the inclusion of metadata-only (no full-text) records. The purpose of each pilot project was to determine the feasibility and provide an assessment of the long-term impact on the repository’s mission statement, staffing, and collection development policies. Next Steps: This article shares the results of the pilot project and explores the impact for faculty and end users as well as the implications for repositories

The Efficacy and Optimization of Somatosensory Intracortical Microstimulation in Rats

Demand exists for brain-machine interfaces that offer a wide range of sensory feedback along with volitional motor control to individuals with limited control of natural sensory or motor function. As these sensorimotor devices are developed, it is necessary to improve the interaction between the prostheses and higher-level cortical structures. Optimizing these somatosensory stimulation parameters will require the use of a high-throughput experimental design. To address this, one Sprague-Dawley rat was trained to respond to auditory stimuli during a conditioned-avoidance behavior task and then implanted with a penetrating microelectrode array in the part of the somatosensory cortex corresponding to the left forelimb. After implantation, the task was repeated using electrical stimuli instead of auditory signals. Detection threshold data was collected from each electrode site to prove stimulation efficacy. The pulse rate of electrical stimulation was varied to optimize power usage by the neuroprosthesis while still achieving the lowest possible thresholds. Electrical impedance spectroscopy and cyclic voltammetry data were collected to monitor the performance of the electrode. Testing shows that auditory learning can be translated to somatosensory stimulation. As an aggregate, somatosensory detection thresholds are significantly different from those in the auditory cortex (Student’s t-test, p \u3c 0.0003). With these results in mind, future research can further optimize somatosensory intracortical microstimulation to provide more sensory feedback in motor prostheses

Transcending Institutions and Borders: 21st Century Digital Scholarship at K-State

Digital scholarship of the 21st century transcends institutions and borders with its freedom from print and physical locations. This case study reviews aspects of establishing a sustainable digital scholarship center, supporting open access through the institutional repository (K-State Research Exchange - K-REx) and an open access publishing platform (New Prairie Press – NPP) along with other outreach efforts. The Center for the Advancement of Digital Scholarship (CADS) at K-State Libraries serves our campus community, but digital scholarship extends K-State\u27s impact far beyond Manhattan, Kansas. Highlighting the scholarship at our campus is only one small piece of the landscape. Collaboration on campus with both faculty and students includes working with authors, editors, and site administrators; but our roles in educating, publishing, supporting, and managing open access, including data management, publishing funds and textbook initiatives, have broader implications. This paper illustrates strategies that support all types of digital scholarship and contends that single direct connections to K-State can translate into partnerships which have regional, national, and international reach