Models of early adoption of ICT innovations in higher education

One of the common dilemmas faced by developers of information communication technology (ICT) initiatives is how to go about identifying potential early adopters of their service. This article outlines background research into this area and details the approaches taken within the JISC-funded Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories Project to locate these key individuals within a Higher Education (HE) environment. The concept of an innovation is discussed and the differences between the terms innovation and invention are outlined. Models and frameworks for describing the process of introducing an innovation to an organisation are described. These suggest influential institutional factors, key characteristics of individuals, the innovation, and the organisation that affect the diffusion of an innovation. Together these features create the environment in which new innovations are explored

Converting the physical to the virtual: providing a laboratory experience for distance learners in engineering

Face-to-face modules on the full-time Masters in Renewable Energy Systems Technology at Loughborough University involve students collecting data from physical laboratory experiments. Conversion to distance learning mode, due to demand from industry for the skills and competencies acquired, raised the problem of providing a comparable laboratory experience. The solution adopted was to develop a number of virtual laboratories to enable distance students to experience the same experiments as their face-to-face peers, the focus in both modes being on interpreting the data generated. The virtual laboratory described in this paper was designed to provide activities requiring students to review content covered in study notes, enhancing the learning associated with their progress through the experiment. This paper will provide evidence to show that distance students were not disadvantaged and that student evaluative feedback has been generally positive

Digital lifecycles and file types: final report

The Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories Project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under the Digital Repositories Programme. This represents a cooperative venture between the Department of Information Science (DIS), the Engineering Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (engCETL) and the University Library. The two year project aims to establish a single Blended repository to meet the teaching and research needs of this institution. It will address the motivational issues facing depositors of teaching materials with a focus on the associated Rights and Rewards. This digital lifecycles study will identify the most appropriate materials for submission to the project’s demonstrator repository. This takes into account factors like: granularity, persistence and multimedia types that can be supported for both teaching and research materials. It also documents the existing lifecycles of these items and the tools and specifications needed within a repository frameworks to support these lifecycles. For example, it will identify appropriate granularity of teaching resources and appropriate methods for content packaging. The results of the study will help to identify which types of files are currently in use, which formats should be supported by the repository system ultimately selected for the demonstrator repository. This information is likely to be of benefit to other projects and institutions in the process of setting up an Institutional Repository (IR)

The Rights and Rewards project: teaching resource repository infrastructure

The sharing of resources for use in teaching and learning within higher education institutions is one of the issues that the Rights and Rewards projects seeks to address. Through survey and interviews the project has identified a willingness, on the part of academics and other staff groups, to engage in activities that result in greater exposure of their teaching resources and expertise. The mechanism that the project proposes to put in place to facilitate sharing across the sector is an institutional repository. This teaching resource repository will be established as a demonstrator, which will be available until the completion of the project

Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories Project

The Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under the Digital Repositories Programme. This represents a cooperative venture, at Loughborough University, between the Department of Information Science (DIS), the Engineering Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (engCETL) and the University Library. This two year project which started in summer 2005 aims to establish a blended repository service to meet the teaching and research needs of this institution. It will address the motivational issues facing depositors of teaching materials with a focus on the associated rights and rewards

Copyright ownership of teaching materials

In 1998, JISC commissioned a Senior Management Briefing Paper on Copyright (JISC, 1998, p.4), which recommended that “all members of HEIs [Higher Education Institutions], whether staff or students should be educated about the basics of copyright and what is acceptable practice”. A later study, also in relation to copyright in HEIs, stated that “there would seem to be a considerable gap between the legal position and what academic staff believe are their rights” (Weedon, 2000, p.16). Although this is not a recent study, the difference between the actual situation and the perceived situation amongst academics in terms of the ownership of their teaching materials is still unclear. Project RoMEO (2003), which focused on author attitudes associated with research outputs, surveyed participants and investigated who owned the copyright of journal papers that these authors had produced. Under one third (32%) of participants did not know this, which is concerning. It is no surprise then that Cornish (2004, p.12) believes the “ownership of copyright is complex”

Workflow mapping and stakeholder analysis: final report

The Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR, 2006), shows that there are 69 Higher Education (HE) Institutional repositories in the UK, with 60 of these being devoted to research material. There are very few institutional teaching and learning material repositories in the UK, and these repository types seem to exist on a much wider scale at present. An example of which, is the JISC’s Online Repository of [teaching and learning] Materials (JORUM). There is a clear need for investigation into institutional repositories that contain teaching material. According to the Digital Repositories Road Map, which represents JISC’s vision for 2010, we need to carry out analysis of existing business processes, workflows and dataflows; identify opportunities for innovative inter-working between repositories and between repositories and other applications (Heery & Powell, 2006). The Community Dimensions of a Learning Object Repository (CD-LOR, 2006) project team have already been looking into workflows with regards to learning objects and the Repository Management and Metadata (RepoMMan, 2006) have been investigating research output workflows. We are looking into workflows related to teaching material

Rights and Rewards Project: Academic Survey - final report

As part of the JISC funded Rights and Rewards in Blended Institutional Repositories project, a motivational survey was undertaken. A questionnaire addressed to all academic staff in UK Further Education (FE) institutions and to specialists in the field of Teaching and Learning (T&L) was available online. The aim of the questionnaire was to gather views on the use of an institutional repository (IR) for the deposit of teaching and learning materials. Two of the main areas of interest were: • What ‘Rights’ would individuals expect to exert over the teaching materials they deposit into a repository? • What ‘Rewards’ would motivate them to deposit their teaching materials? This report outlines the activities undertaken in the preparation of the questionnaire, including brief notes on the pilot studies. It also details efforts to advertise the survey and provides a analysis of the responses

Attitudes to the rights and rewards for author contributions to repositories for teaching and learning

In the United Kingdom over the past few years there has been a dramatic growth of national and regional repositories to collect and disseminate resources related to teaching and learning. Most notable of these are the Joint Information Systems Committee’s Online Repository for [Learning and Teaching] Materials as well as the Higher Education Academy’s subject specific resource databases. Repositories in general can hold a range of materials not only related to teaching and learning, but more recently the term ‘institutional repository’ is being used to describe a repository that has been established to support open access to a university’s research output. This paper reports on a survey conducted to gather the views of academics, support staff and managers on their past experiences and future expectations of the use of repositories for teaching and learning. The survey explored the rights and rewards associated with the deposit of materials into such repositories. The findings suggest what could be considered to be an ‘ideal’ repository from the contributors’ perspective and also outlines many of the concerns expressed by respondents in the survey