01ingenta

ingenta institute Conference, 26th September 2000

The Institute of Directors, London

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Virtual Teaching, Virtual Libraries and Virtual Value

by

Derek Law

(Transcribed from a recorded presentation.)

When I was asked to prepare a presentation about virtual learning and virtual teaching, I realised that I didn’t really know what a library was anymore. So I am going to share with you some of my anxieties, rather than give you any answers. Nor am I absolutely sure that I know what a university is anymore. It used to be a place where we would take 18 and 19 year olds for three years and let them experiment with sex and drugs and rock and roll, and then cast them out hopefully into gainful employment or else into politics. The university itself is beginning to change quite dramatically and I would like to spend a little time here exploring how universities are changing. The numbers and figures I am going to give you are from my own university -- other universities could mirror and match them in different ways. Strathclyde is a middle-of-the-road kind of university. It specialises in continuous professional development, but other than that is a fairly standard university.

First of all, universities in the west of Scotland tend to be thought of as local universities. 40% of our student intake comes from within 35 miles. We have about 20,000 FTE students and about 15,000 of them come from the heartland of Scotland. That is the traditional core business, but we are branching out in all sorts of ways. Increasingly, we are a global university. We have a further 40,000 students who come to the university for an examinable qualification every year, bringing our student base to 60,000 people. These students come from over 100 countries, some of them in residence and some of them working abroad doing sandwich years of various sorts as well as many people from the surrounding area seeking to update their skills or find new ones.

One of the reasons that we got into this kind of market is because the government is mean with its money. We are going to get an 8% increase in the budget next year and then almost nothing for the following two years. So we go to overseas countries. In our case, we go for example to Norway, because Norway is not in the European Union. Norwegian students studying for a Business Studies degree are charged £16,000 a year. From Danish students coming from within the European Union, we only get £4,000. The government has created every incentive to globalise our market and to go out there and recruit, and we’ve done that. We have just opened a business school in Shanghai. It is our own business school, not a franchising arrangement. Our staff are out there teaching Chinese people who typically work for American multi-nationals in Shanghai. It is a lucrative business for us. We expect to open other business schools and other faculties in other countries. We can also do the sort of thing that is not quite a franchising arrangement, like in Malaysia where pharmacy students undertake two years of training and then come to Scotland for their third year and, we hope, will go on to do a Masters degree. Finally, we have just launched our first joint degree with four other European universities. It is a Masters degree in business in which the students take modules at the four different universities and move around Europe doing it. It is a joint degree, jointly awarded by all four universities. Again, I would expect more of that to happen, and we will look mainly at countries outside the EU because there is more money in it. This is very different from the sort of university in which I grew up. Different people are there, more part time and more mature students from the UK, more overseas students, with many more opportunities for students to live in and work in other countries as part of their degree. I have to support them then as an Academic Services Manager.

We continue to be a local university. Or are we? There are only four departments of marine technology left in a once great naval nation. Two of them are in Glasgow. That was last week, and this week we have just merged the two departments. We have a joint law school with the University of Glasgow, a joint social work department with Caledonian University, and some joint nursing degrees with Bell College, which has just been made a higher education institution. It is very difficult for me now to say where the boundaries of the university stop. When one comes to issues like site licensing of journals, that then raises all sorts of interesting issues as to what constitutes a site. Students increasingly work away from the university. When I was at Kings College in London, one of the old jokes there was that “Thank God for Mondays” because if all of the students turned up at the same time, we wouldn’t have had anywhere to put them -- the building programmes in universities hadn’t kept pace with expansion. To a large extent, that remains the case. We rely on de facto distance learning, on students not turning up at the university for significant periods of the week, because we have no where to put them. We rely increasingly on them studying in residence halls and at home. Anybody who has tried to use a modem from home with its wonderful 28.8 kilobyte capacity will understand why many students would prefer to go to the growing number of community learning centres with broadband technology and broadband capacity. The government has promised to bring broadband to the home (and since the government has made this promise, it will no doubt happen in a generation or two).

In the meantime, students will continue to go to local places. Increasingly, our students will be undertaking legitimate study in libraries which are not ones that I control. There will be community learning centres governed by local community groups. We have access courses that we validate, and also have ten further education colleges in the metropolitan area. These are our students -- they are taught by our teachers, but they are taught at the sub-degree level. Again, it is not clear to me where the boundary of the university lies in terms of support. At the same time, we have literally hundreds of staff and students at any one time off-site at other institutions up and down the country who quite legitimately want to gain access to the resources which we have purchased and paid for. The concept of the university being a bounded physical place in which students work and study has disappeared. We are just in the process of setting up an 0800 number and we will have password protected access to all of our resources. Anyone in the UK can get free password-protected access directly into the university network, so those off campus now have access to university resources. Once they are in the university network, I have no way of knowing whether they are off site or on site. Hence, we are also an electronic university.

Clyde Virtual University is the first operational virtual university in the United Kingdom. It has been running for two years now and has about 1500 registered students taking courses, particularly in mechanical engineering, civil engineering, and social work. Students have a range of activities that they can take part in. We have attempted to replicate all of the functions of the university from administration and the student’s union bar through to the examination room and the electronic library. We have students paradoxically studying within the university who have access to a virtual university. We are in discussion with a number of other countries about replicating that virtual university off campus. Clyde Virtual University is a part of the University of Strathclyde, although jointly owned by Glasgow, Paisley, and Caledonian Universities. It writes contracts, buys things in its own right, and yet is part of our organisation. How we actually support it and set up relationships is proving extremely complex.

Students increasingly expect a managed learning environment, an idea largely taken from the Harvard Business School and the Dearing report which is now beginning to get some money behind it. Students expect, in effect, an individual portal, which provides a lot of information, of which probably the most important part is the personal diary. Quite a bit of my effort goes into maintaining that personal diary and doing things like telling students that because lecturer X is ill, the next lecture is cancelled, or because we had floods over the weekend, the lecture theatre has been changed to another. They automatically find that information as soon as they log on. Some of this is paid for through advertising; we are increasingly striking deals with agencies and with third parties to provide relevant advertising.

The site also includes huge amounts of locally created or acquired courseware (acquired tends to be things like TLTP material which we can get from other universities and customise). I have an audio-visual department of 35 staff and we spend the entire time producing courseware. Several hundred hours of courseware a year are produced by them. Some of it we then try to sell on into the commercial market place to pass on to other institutions. I see increasing activity in the marketing of courseware. The site also has course reading lists, which is the most relevant thing I have to provide in terms of the support. Obvious things like the library catalogue are there. We also have a book shop on-site, and we provide links from the catalogue to the bookshops. If books are not in the library or available through the library, there is always the possibility of getting them in the bookshop. We allow electronic ordering of documents. Students can do this by snail-mail if they are off campus. We also provide ready e-access to all sorts of materials, most of it in the public domain.

The kind of question which I find very difficult is: what is legitimate for a student on the Island of Harris registered for a distance learning Masters degree to have access to? If it is through the 0800 number, that’s probably okay because he or she is registered as one of our students. But if the student takes a trip to the United States on holiday and cannot use the 0800 number, it is not clear to me whether he or she should still be eligible for access to that material. Conversely, I am not sure why the son of the Dean of Medicine who is not a member of the university but has his father’s password should actually be allowed access to the material. So there are some enormously complicated issues which we haven’t really addressed in terms of providing support, but increasingly these courses simply rely on the electronic resources made available.

If it doesn’t exist electronically, it doesn’t exist seems to be a growing student attitude. We have just begun a pilot project in our Business School where we provide undergraduates with laptops. About 40% of students come to university now with a PC. That number is rising very quickly, and our aim is to get students to the 100% level in about three years. Students are now coming to university without textbooks. (When I went to off university, the first thing my parents went to buy me was a university scarf and every book on the first year reading list.) Instead we’re providing a laptop where needed and recommending to students that they buy a laptop with a wireless card. We need these big 250 seat lecture theatres less and less. We’re not quite sure what we do need to replace them. Once you start providing laptops, small groups of students begin to come together and every room becomes a classroom, and the notion of a lecture theatre begins to disappear.

We are also seeing the first signs of a diminishing market in photocopies. People are dumping web pages to their printers instead. That is bad news for us because it means the library budget begins to suffer as photocopying diminishes -- the printing revenue goes to the IT department. You can now get a scanner for about fifty pounds. It’s not wonderful but it’s perfectly adequate to rip off publishers, commit piracy, and send files around the country. It is very difficult for us to police that. We can police a photocopying machine fairly effectively, but we cannot police scanners in individual student bedrooms to the same effect. Many PCs you can buy come with a web cam these days. Students are interacting not in lecture theatres, but in the middle of the night using their web cams, talking to each other, and talking in groups. This has brought about quite different learning models, such as asynchronous learning: any time, any place, anywhere. For the first time learning is undertaken when the student wants it, where the student wants it, and in the comfort that the student requires. Only very rarely now does learning happen in the lecture theatre. That is clearly the way it’s all going -- asynchronous learning. Nintendo learning is another such model. It’s not quite what you might suppose. It’s a new style of learning brought about by games in which people expect to make mistakes rapidly but not repeatedly. You make one mistake very quickly and you then move onto the next level. That’s how you play Nintendo games and that’s increasingly the way in which students begin to learn.

So, how have we begun to respond to student-driven, student-centred learning, and to the evident financial pressures? One answer is resource sharing, as in using a Z39.50 interface to treat all of the catalogues of the Scottish universities as a single catalogue and operate them as a single university so you can identify resources and acquire them as you wish. We are also beginning to treat the region as a kind of resource in itself, a unit of support and sharing of special collections and archives on a regional basis. Turning to our engineering libraries, Glasgow and Strathclyde are in the process of merging into one engineering library. We have a single resource which is managed by a single librarian to support both universities. It is in an exploratory phase, being funded to see how this can actually work. We can either have equality or mediocrity across all disciplines, or else we can say: my university will specialise in engineering, Glasgow University will specialise in the life sciences and medicine, Caledonian will specialise in professions allied to medicine, and so on. We have actually built decent collections for the region in one library, and we make them available through a combination of improved access arrangements and improved electronic distribution. The price of Strathclyde providing engineering library services to our neighbouring university is that we must provide faxed copies of articles to lecturers’ desktops within two hours. Glasgow Digital Library has also been set up as a consortium arrangement based on the local metropolitan area network. It is available throughout West-Central Scotland now, providing resources which have been collected and digitised locally, whether courseware or images, or material provided by the public library service (particularly image collections and local history materials). We are trying to build this like the California Digital Library has done as a separate entity. It is not a branch of my library or a branch of somebody else’s library -- it’s an additional, new library resource within West-Central Scotland.

It would be idle to pretend that these universities have pursued reciprocal institution membership as an attempt to get around copyright restrictions or IPR restrictions of any sort. The word library does not pass by the Vice Chancellors that often, but in a spirit of co-operation we have simply declared staff members at one institution to be staff members at another institution en block. We are now beginning to do that with students too. As we have more and more joint departments, it makes it much simpler if we register people as members of the institution, rather than as visitors. Again, what this means for support is very unclear. Students now have two library cards, one for Glasgow University and one for Strathclyde. We will, I think, almost certainly move to the Sunderland model, where there is a single library card for access to any library in the metropolitan area. Everyone in that metropolitan area will be considered a member of the library. There is a big sum of money supporting all of this cross-sectoral activity including the non-formula funding programme, the research support library’s programme, and the 50 million pounds from NOF coming up for content creation. I would guess that the public sector has created something like £200 to £300 million worth of content in the last four years. I am not sure how big the publishing industry’s contribution to content has been over that time, but £200 to £300 million is a considerable slab of money by anybody’s standards. I really don’t think the implications of having these resources available have been worked through yet. In particular, one of the great advantages of electronic technology is the ability to handle images. A lot of this new content is image-based, and we have still to see what impact that is going to have.

Finally, because students expect to see 24-hour-a-day support, we are doing international deals. We have just set up a deal with the University of Technology in Sydney and are looking for a Canadian partner, so that we will be able to provide 7 x 24 reference support. Since the number of calls will be small, most of the work can be dealt with using FAQs. It is quite attractive to be able to say to our students that there is a reference librarian on hand to deal with you individually 24 hours per day.

In short, we are doing a great deal to broaden the resource base we have through increased sharing, and to deal with the different ways people learn by providing different methods of access. We are beginning to accommodate student demand, but very slowly. There is a quite clear drift away from library usage, and a very noticeable decrease in library loans. The SCONUL bulletin board has been ablaze in recent weeks with people sharing information about declining use of the library. It seems to me that this is a growing trend. There are two ways of reversing it and I have used both of them. One is to put in lots of IT resources in the library because students will come in and use those. It is very depressing to find that the floor is full with terminals and students queuing to use the terminals, with acres of free books space upstairs and nobody using them. The other way is to shut down the toilet so that people have to pay twice as many visits to the library-- I’ve done that too! So we have what appears to be just the beginning of a pattern of decreasing library use. I would like to think that what is happening is that quick, casual use of the library is dropping off but sustained study is staying at the same level, but that might be wishful thinking. What is clearly happening is dramatic increases in hits on web pages and on web resources. Hence, the “Martini” or asynchronous learning phenomenon of people logging on as and when it suits them, and increasingly as we give them mobile laptop technology. As they wander around the university, they will log on and off the network all day. If they need to make a quick reference enquiry, they simply log on and don’t bother coming to the library at all.

I have already mentioned growing PC ownership -- already at 40% with first year undergraduates and growing very quickly. We also see increasingly real-time interactive learning. I am not referring here to asynchronous learning, where you can log on to yesterday’s lecture and have a look at, but to student interaction in chat rooms in real-time with other individuals. Students learning from each other is a hugely important phenomenon in the educational process. In so-called “Think Pad” universities in the States, students mark each others assignments, and they are tougher markers than lecturers are by about 5% on average. There is a huge learning process involved. If you are going to expose your work to other students, you make very sure it’s good, where you might try to skate on thin ice with a lecturer, because you had a cold or the dog ate your textbook or whatever. If you actually have to mark your peers’ assignments, you perhaps do that more conscientiously than the lecturer who is trying to meet other deadlines.

Streaming video and data are another growing, important educational tool. At the same time, universities are beginning to harden their views on IPR and content ownership. One of the paradoxes about this for me is that it involves teaching materials rather than research materials, where the battle has been raging for many years. We have set up a digital information office that looks at the material provided by our academic staff, and we have discovered a number of obvious things. First of all, we have no idea who owns the IPR in our teaching materials. All we know that each course costs a six-figure sum to create. We are likely throwing away tax-payer money, because we are investing all that money and yet don’t know who owns the outcome. At the same time, we have in the university five different models in operation for rewarding academic staff, including a variety of royalty payment arrangements. That is not sustainable as we move towards content-based distance learning. We will have to resolve with academic staff the ownership of IPR in the materials they produce. Hence, I imagine we are going to get into this paradoxical situation where teaching materials resolve IPR issues for research as well.

There are barriers to progress. It remains very difficult to do distance learning because the broadband technology is not there yet. It is coming quickly but it’s not coming uniformly. Then there is VAT on electronic products. Why on earth would we buy electronic products for the privilege of paying an extra 17.5% to the government?! It is not rational. I cannot in any rational way justify buying electronic products to support people overseas if I have to pay that extra money -- not least because we don’t have the extra money.

Social exclusion issues are also very important. The government announced recently that it is putting a lot of money into social exclusion issues. The laptops that we are giving to students are in many cases the first computer in the family home. West-Central Scotland has huge unemployment rates, as do many other parts of the country. Tackling these social exclusion issues is not always compatible with the IT agenda and the distance learning agenda. We expect to see some resistance from students. A student coming from Norway who has already paid £10,000 in course fees is not going to welcome the notion of having to pay another couple of thousand for pay-per-view. In their view, they have paid £10,000 for the course and that is that -- end of argument. They expect us to provide the materials.

There is also a lack of quality control of resources. We have no idea of what is good and what is bad. Different institutions make attempts to do this, but it is very difficult for individuals to actually work out whether have got the right stuff. The first time I went up to the University of Aberdeen as an external lecturer I tried to book a hotel on line. I did a Yahoo search and got 364,712 hits. There aren’t that many people in Aberdeen! I should have just gone and asked the reference librarian about a hotel in Aberdeen. She would have got out “Where to stay in Scotland,” opened up at the letter “A,” and that’s it. The ability to actually use the web is not as good as the web itself is. Licensing models and site licences are part of this. I was a great champion of site licences at one time but I don’t know what a site is anymore. I don’t know how to define a site. I don’t even really know how to define a metropolitan area, if we have legitimately got students in a 100 different countries enrolled on a metropolitan campus. I think regional licenses are more promising. The base of metropolitan area networks gives us the possibility of acquiring resources in sensible ways and sharing them. This might open up new markets like schools, who will start to bring in money where there wasn’t before. But what is a region? Is a student in London who is one of our students part of the region of West-Central Scotland?

Turning to pay-per-view, I just don’t think it remains politically acceptable except in a minority of cases. The reasons range from social exclusion, because people cannot afford it, through to the people who are paying high fees and who think they have paid enough already. On the other hand, I think we will see the equivalent of electronic course packs, but more and more effort will be made to create them locally. The CLA model is not popular in universities, and it doesn’t form a basis on which one can move into an electronic environment. So, cold comfort there for publishers.

I don’t know what libraries and universities are anymore. I used to be absolutely certain of everything in life -- usually wrong, but certain. Most of my certainties have gone, as the university spread into a multi-national company, and as the ability of library services to provide global support to those people who are actually members of the institution appears to diminish almost daily. We can provide support in terms of IT and electronic materials developed locally, but I am not sure we can provide support for the library. This doesn’t appear to worry people yet, but I think should scare the hell out of publishers. As the publishing equivalent of Napster, OCLC is developing Markster. The ability to go out to other people’s PCs and actually acquire all the information you want and by-pass all the conventional systems seems to me to be entirely plausible, because all you are doing is identifying a file and pulling it back. I think there are huge opportunities here for piracy of all sorts. I don’t think we have done enough yet to encourage advertising sponsorship to create free services. There is clearly a large lucrative market there. The biggest advertising budgets go in support of trying to persuade 18-25 year olds to buy things, yet we haven’t tapped the advertising possibilities at all.

Nor have we seen any significant attempt in the commercial publishing industry to do what Bill Gates has done so well, which is to provide cheap products, make them available very easily to people, and then make money from the value-added you provide, whether that is in manuals, in updates, or in training programmes. If we are going that far, why don’t we just outsource libraries altogether -- a heretical thought? We have recently seen Elsevier climb into bed with a library system supplier. If you begin to control something like three quarters of the supply chain, it seems to me a very small step to say you control the whole supply chain in an electronic environment. We have gotten into a situation with electronic materials which I deplore, where we lease rather than purchase them. It doesn’t then seem impossible to say that the library in an electronic world could be outsourced, and that we would simply buy in the services and the materials we need.

A typical university library costs 3-4 million pounds a year to run. That’s a pretty large budget. With this sort of money involved, I expect at some stage people will begin to talk about outsourcing. I have already been approached by neighbouring institutions who wish to, in effect, outsource their library to me. The GAELS project is one in which Glasgow University is effectively outsourcing its engineering library provision. If I can do it, a commercial provider can do it also. However, one thing that we do have over the commercial sector is information skills. Information skills and training seem to be the cornerstones of the service that we will continue to provide to serve distance learners. The ability to manage information on the net is fundamental. We have mandatory IT skills courses for all of our students. I don’t think it will be very long before we have mandatory information skills courses for all of our students. I intend to be the person who gives them, because I’ve still got 12 years to go before retirement.