3/3/00Besser--Learning Resources Assn of Calif Comm Colleges 1 Digital Delivery of Instructional Support Materials: How will our learning institutions

3/3/00Besser--Learning Resources Assn of Calif Comm Colleges1

Digital Delivery of Instructional Support Materials:

How will our learning institutions change?

Howard BesserAssociate Professor

UCLA School of Education & Information

http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/



How will our learning institutions change?-

• Background: Changes from Digital World• Opportunities and Threats of Online Education

– Impediments posed by recent changes in Intellectual Property Laws

• Lessons from the MESL Project– Interoperability issues and emerging standards for

library materials and instructional courseware

– Instructor difficulties in teaching with digital materials


Background: Changes from Digital World

• User Access (and expectation) from desktop

• Decline in use of print material

• User acceptance of lower service (eg. less authoritative info)

• Disintermediation

• Libraries move from storehouses to gateways (just in case to just in time)

• Library ownership to Licensing

• Lifelong Learning and the accompanying growth of Online Education offered by the private sector

• Opportunities for new types of teaching, combining resources from disparate sources in interesting ways


Samples from a MESL Site


Creating New Image Sets (Views)


Opportunities and Threats ofOnline Education-

• Ways to talk about Distance Ed

• Changes to Personnel

• Social Issues

• Intellectual Property Issues

• Ownership and other legal issues


Framing Distance Education Activities^

time/place intersection direction of communication level of interactivity backchannel beyond the classroom


Infrastructure & Delivery Issues^

• Infrastructure & resources needed– to support the equivalent of classroom instruction– to support interaction between the individuals involved in the educational

process– to provide instructional support material

• Classroom Presentation Differs– change in presentation material– instructor dress and delivery style– interaction between students and instructor

• Multi-campus sites– scheduling– differing administrative rules– differing institutional expectations of students– differing institutional expectations of instructors


Instructor & Instructional Support-^

Role of instructor & Instructional Support

– new instructional support personnel

– new roles for traditional instructional support personnel

– new tools for instructional support and collaboration

– new delivery vehicles

Locus of control

– the closer students are to the instructor (both in time and in space) the more control the instructor exerts


Impact of Distance Education (1 of

2)^

• The Rhetoric• The Motives

– Who are the advocates

– Changing the allocation of resources– Shifting the locus of control

• Impact on Instructor and Instructor Community

– Reliance on Experts

– Centralized Control– Education more subject to Market Forces– Diminishment of Cross-Disciplinary Interactions– Changes in Power Relationships


Impact of Distance Education (2 of

2)^

Impact on Student Experience– Loss of a Physical Community– Distance in Interactions

The Squeeze on Upper level Education Important Questions

– What is Appropriate Subject Matter?– Is it Viable for the Liberal Arts?– What is Appropriate Context?– What is Appropriate Methodology?


Changes in Power and Relationships

• In the Classroom– Instructor Presence– Power of the Technician

• Between Administration and Faculty

• Changes to Education in General


Delivering a Consumer Product:‘The Next University: Drive-Thru U.’ by James Traub, New Yorker,

Oct 20/27, 1997, pp 114-123 (1/2)^

• William Gibbs U of Phoenix president: “The people who are our students don’t really want the education. They want what the education provides for them, -- better jobs, moving up in their career, the ability to speak up in meetings, that kind of stuff. They want it to DO something for them.” (p 114)

• ”What was a little hard to get used to, though, was the lack of intellectual, as opposed to professional, curiosity. Ideas had value only insofar as they could be put to use -- if they could DO something for you... Here was a university formed around the idea that practiced experience is superior to abstract understanding...” (p 121)


Delivering a Consumer Product:‘The Next University: Drive-Thru U.’ by James Traub, New Yorker,

Oct 20/27, 1997, pp 114-123 (2/2)

• Stephen Spangehl, an official with the North Central Association (regional accrediting body) was concerned about “the university’s lack of rigorous academic assessment. ‘They seem more concerned aboutcustomer satisfaction.’ ” (p122)

• Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University, studied college students who aren’t full-time and in residence. He found that “they wanted the kind of relationship with a college that they had with their bank, their supermarket, and their gas company. They say, ‘I want terrific service, I want convenience, I want quality control. Give me classes twenty-four hours a day, and give me in-class parking, if possible.’ These are students who want stripped-down classes. They don’t want to buy anything they’re not using.” (p 116)


Final Advice on Distance Learning^

• Figure out what you really want to do

• Make sure it matches your mission• Don’t do it for the wrong reasons• Make sure the delivery vehicle matches the

curriculum and the pedigogical style• Remember to consider the necessary curricular

support• Assess the impact on your organization and the

members


Issues of Using Copyrighted Materials in Teaching-

• Section #110 background

• Teaching with Distance Ed -- Copyright implications


Section #110 Exemptions

• 1976 Act -- affirmative Distance Ed exemptions– performance & display by analog transmission

• Digital Millennium Copyright Act– no such exemptions for transmission over

network unless Copyright Office study determines it is necessary. Study did confirm it, but legislation still needs to be shaped and passed.


Showing Copyrighted Material


Why do we need Section #110 Exemptions?-

• Teaching a Distance Learning Course is HARD• To be a decent teacher, you need flexibility• Licensing schemes and other prior permission-seeking

inhibit teaching flexibility• Teachers need to be able to use various types of media,

whether they are fictional or not.• Distance Learning and educational innovation will

drastically suffer (and probably wither) if the section #110 exemptions are not extended to allow the same performance and display in a distant digital environment that we currently have in the classroom


Teaching with Technology is difficult, and Distance Learning makes it even

worse^

UCB Mellon Grant-JASIS-


UCB Mellon Grant (page 6-1)

• “We need to understand the various obstacles to teaching with digital images before such image use is widely adopted within the instructional process”

• “...current university infrastructures were woefully inadequate for using digital images in the classroom [faculty needed] ... technical support and training, ... time commitment to learn and develop the new technology ...”

• “The complexity of the aggregate components (equipment, training, support, and more) was the overwhelming barrier for most faculty.”


“Issues & Challenges for the Distance Independent Environment” JASIS, 11/96

• “Students in remote sites pose problems for conventional types of instructional support that take place outside the classroom.”

• “Reserve readings and other course materials pose a difficulty for many distance independent courses. Students at remote sites will often have library services inferior to those at the point of origin. Trying to distribute time-sensitive printed materials is difficult enough in a single-site environment; it is extremely difficult to mainttain timeliness in distributing to remote sites. The obvious solution ... is for the instructor to make this material available to remote students over the Internet. But converting and mounting such resources can pose intellectual porperty and logistical headaches...”


Who Owns Distance Education Courses?

• Often team-produced


Who wants ownership & why?

• Colleges & universities want to be able to remarket courses

• Professors want to be able to take their courses with them to new colleges & universities


Ownership Models

• Patent Model– College or university owns right and shares

income with faculty– Preferred by Administration

• Textbook Model– Owned by faculty, with no claim by

administration– Favored by faculty


An example of this contentious area: Drexel

• A Drexel administrator has asserted that the School should own all rights to on-line course materials but share these with faculty (patent model)

• Some professors say they’ll refuse to participate in distance ed if they cede control to administrators

• Administrators need to promote faculty interest and excitement in order to get distance education off the ground


Digital Diploma Mills


Take-Down Provisions DMCA protects OSPs (colleges & universities) from

damages if a student or faculty posts something in violation of copyright only if the OSP:

• Notifies the Copyright Office of a designated agent to receive complaints about copyright violations from rightsholders

• Accommodates industry-standard technical measures used by owners to protect their works from unlawful access and copyright infringement

• Develops and posts a policy for termination of repeat offenders


Take-Down Implications

• OSP must take immediate action to eliminate offending material as soon as a copyright owner brings it to their attention

• Even if there’s disagreement over whether the offending material violates copyright law, the OSP is responsible for removing the offending material, and can be held liable if they don’t


Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL)

• merged content (including digital images) from 7 museums & LC

• merged content delivered to 7 universities

• each university chose a different delivery method


Digital Delivery-- The UCB Mellon Grant to Study MESL-

• Assessing University Costs• Examining Faculty & Student Use & Assessment

of Usefullness• Assessing Costs of Slide Libraries• Comparing MESL User Interfaces• Comparing MESL Search Discrepancies• Assessing Museum Costs


General Issues for Cooperative Projects

• Clean Metadata

• Merging metadata from multiple sources

• Centralized vs. Decentralized distribution

• Division of Labor

• Costs and who pays

• Intellectual Property Issues


Teaching Tools


University Infrastructure Costs

• High speed networks

• Classroom projection

• Workstation labs

• Workstations

• Costs must be spread across the entire campus


University Issues

• More technology resources for Humanities departments

• Faculty need incentives to teach with digital images

• Resources and tools are needed to making teaching with digital images less difficult

• Universities need to make digital projects a priority and need to find funding to carry them out


Security

• Universities can exercise sufficient control over initial access to image

• Museums may want more sophisticated protection to prevent copying and reposting


Integration of records from different museums

• Metadata posed more of a problem than images– Mapping fields– Different vocabularies


Authority control over artist name

• Goya y Lucinetes, Francisco de (Houston)

• Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de (Harvard)

• Goya, Francisco de (NGA)


Examining Faculty & Student Use & Usefulness

• What Faculty Do with Digital Images

• Major Issues for Faculty

• Faculty Concerns about teaching with Digital Images

• Faculty Concerns about Image Quality and Metadata


Digital Distribution is:

• Good for individual usage

• Problematic for group viewing


Content Issues

• Selection will be museum-driven (MESL content selection won’t scale up)

• Sufficient critical mass?

• All the appropriate images needed to teach?

• Transparent integration with locally-mounted images and those from other sources?


Query and Use

• Users will want more than just query options

• Centralized development of searching, user interface, and tools is much more cost effective than than local development

• Local development can be more quickly responsive to local needs


Storage & Bandwidth

• Technological advances make this less of an impediment

• May still cause bottlenecks in centralized delivery systems


Centralized delivery to users& local mounting

• How to transparently integrate both?


Coexistence of Analog and Digital• Many years before we reach a critical mass in digital

form• Many more years before we’ll have the right images

to teach with• Instructors will draw on both slide libraries and

digital collections• But how will universities financially support both?• Responsibility for digital collections is likely to rest

within a campuswide unit (not a departmental one)


Faculty Use of Digital Images

• Primarily– Classroom Projection– Assignments

• Secondarily– to create online study guides for students– make comparisons in class– manipulate images (outline objects in images, add/remove

color, show part of an image in detail)– create art (in studio art classes)


Faculty Use of Digital Images : Major Issues

• technical support

• training

• tools (software and hardware)

• time commitment


Faculty Concerns About Teaching with Digital Images

• the value placed on their work by their universities

• the enormous time commitment required to develop digital projects

• how quickly digital projects can become obsolete


Faculty Concerns about Image Quality and Metadata

• Image quality is important, but the quality needed is contextual

• For these faculty, digital image quality was no worse than slides

• Any metadata delivered must be customizable by faculty member


Costs• Digital distribution under MESL was expensive

• Costs will decline from learning curves and new technological tools

• Cost will increase with each change to new technologies

• Per-image infrastructure costs will decline as fixed costs are spread over a larger number of images

• New costs will arise as the scope of the project increases

– security becomes more of an issue

• Digital distribution has the potential to reach far more potential users than an analog system


Some Concluding Remarks on the Study

• Authoritative museum information has great value to universities

• University infrastructure costs for image delivery are very large, and cannot be justified solely for cultural heritage

• Greatest savings for universities are likely to come from digital delivery of authoritative descriptive information about the image

• The university market does not have enough resources to financially sustain the costs of a museum consortium’s digital distribution system, and such a system must be subsidized by the museums or from external sources.


MESL Follow-on Projects

• Academic Image Cooperative -- http://www.clir.org/diglib/artxdescription.htm

• AMICO Project

• Museum Digital Licensing Consortium



How will our learning institutions change?

• http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Imaging/Databases/1998mellon– Spring 1999 special issue of Visual Resources

• http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Copyright/• http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/disted/• http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/impact/Distance/

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3/3/00Besser--Learning Resources Assn of Calif Comm Colleges 1 Digital Delivery of Instructional Support Materials: How will our learning institutions