We’ve heard a lot about the student perspective on social media, but this concise report is interesting because we see institutional concerns rise to the surface, despite concerns about the self-selection of respondents (all of whom are staff in UK universities).

The JADU Research Report An investigation into the challenges, application and benefits of social media in higher education institutions was conducted “to gain a current picture of the rapidly changing area of social media and looks at the challenges, usage and benefits of social media within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).”

What does the report tell us about social media usage?

Blogging and online forums emerge as the two most frequently used internally provided social media tools. The most frequently used external tools are Twitter and YouTube. Interestingly alumni are revealed to be an important constituency (second only to students) when considering social media usage. The report also suggested that the lack of restriction to social media usage may have future ramifications for privacy, intellectual property and data protection. One respondent pointed out that few new systems are signed up to the Safe Harbor agreement, for example, through which the storage of data outside the European Economic Area has to be compliant with the UK Data Protection Act.

What are the strategic issues?

The report politely describes the strategic direction vis a vis social media as “unclear” in many institutions:

No firm conclusion appears to have been reached on the ownership and management of this new development. It is also not clear whether social media technologies should be treated as a separate strategy, or embedded in core operations?

The strategic driver for 67.9% of responding institutions is the user base (or student expectations).

The growing importance of consistency

Part of the value of this report lies in its findings around microsites:

“The majority of HEIs (40.6%) operate a main web site but are unaware of the number and content of the microsites situated around the institution. Relatively few institutions operate a single main website only (18.8%), without utilising microsites for individual faculty or department use.”

As the report correctly points out, consistent branding is increasingly important to HEIs. So ignorance of the university’s microsites is problematic. Consistency is not just a branding issue though – universities are more broadly concerned to provide a consistent experience for students. I’ve found in my own research into Virtual Learning Environments in UK universities that there is pressure to provide a consistent experience for those students following modules in more than one faculty – for example by ensuring that all academic staff follow a consistent approach to the VLE.

This consistency also applies, of course, to social networking tools more generally, as one respondent commented:

Academic staff are very mixed in their use! We have university-run Twitter / Facebook pages and others are using it with students for teaching; however, the central eLearning staff would far rather everyone used WebCT Vista – as they feel that it’s confusing for students to have too many things to think about (which I’m not sure I agree with).

How about the future?

47.3% of respondents intend to adopt Twitter over the next two years; 41.8% intend to use YouTube and 41.1% social networking tools such as Facebook and MySpace. A much smaller percentage of respondents intend to adopt ‘customised’ social networking tools such as Ning.com and Yammer.

Finally, the top three challenges in implementing social media are perceived to be the development of a business case, overcoming cultural issues and dealing with current software compatibility issues.”

The annual report, Learning on demand: Online education in the United States, 2009, presents particularly interesting findings on and insights into the relationship between online learning (defined as courses in which at least 80% of the course content is delivered online) and student retention, to higher education institutions for which retention is a key strategic issue.

Published last month, this annual survey is now into its seventh year, representing responses from over 2,500 colleges and universities. The headline finding would seem to be the continuation of the trend of faster rates of growths in online enrolments than of the overall higher education population. It’s also noteworthy that there is a concentration of enrolments in a very small number of those institutions that offer online courses – 50% of all online students are studying at 6% of those institutions.

Many in and around the field of online education are also interested in the impact of the economic crisis on enrolments onto online courses, and this report reveals that across all institution types, demand is currently greater for online offerings than for their face-to-face counterparts.

To provide some background on the issue of student retention on online courses, the authors make the point that:

Online courses typically attract students who might otherwise not have been able to attend traditional on-campus instruction, either because of work, family, or other obligations. This difference in the nature of the student body has made the direct comparison of retention rates between online and face-to-face very difficult – if students are more likely to drop out of an online course because of work or family commitments, does that reflect the nature of the course or the nature of the student?

The authors were struck by this area being a rare example “where those with experience with online education have a more pessimistic view than those without such experience”. Accordingly, only 19% of institutions with no online offering believe that student retention would be an issue were they to provide it. This contrasts with 31% of those already offering online courses believing it to be an area of difficulty.

This is a salutary finding for those who are developing and / or delivering online education, as it would seem to confirm that difficulties in online retention are a reality rather than a fear. However, it highlights a more general issue for those concerned about student retention in an era of unprecedented diversity in the student body, with increasing numbers of students arriving at university with a complex back story to tell, or conflicting pressures to manage, as opposed to the tabula rasa that 18 year olds more or less uniformly presented at the freshers’ weeks of the past.

This year, the emerging technologies highlighted by the 2010 Horizon report as being particularly valuable for higher education are:

Mobile computing – on the 12 month horizon

Despite obstacles such as privacy and classroom management, more and more educators are exploiting the possibilities of collaboration and communication using students’ own mobile devices. After all, students like the rest of us lead complicated lives, managing conflicting demands, and need learning resources to be available whenever and wherever they can make use of them. The report looks briefly at mobile devices in educational scenarios such as fieldwork.

Open content – on the 12 month horizon

Trailblazed by institutions such as MIT almost a decade ago, open content is expected to move into mainstream use over the next year. Its growth is arguably indicative of a paradigmatic shift towards “collective knowledge and the sharing and reuse of learning and scholarly content”. Flat World Knowledge is cited as a publisher that provides access to textbooks that can be easily customised by academics. Electronic copies are free, but authors receive royalties from the sales of printed copies, irrespective of whether the book has been customised.

E-books – on the 2-3 year horizon

The report notes that their advantages over the printed book are rapidly becoming compelling but I did think that some of the analysis here was a little superficial and trite:

Readers of electronic books may be reading more, as well. Kindle owners, according to Amazon, buy three times as many books as they did before they had Kindles; Sony reports that Reader owners download about eight books per month – as compared to fewer than seven books per year purchased by the average American book buyer in 2008.

This confusion between purchasing behaviour and styles of use undermines the authority of this report. Horizon is right to point to the convenience of “having an entire library of books, magazines, and newspapers…. and all in a single small device”, but the balance and preferences between printed and electronic are more complex at this point than the report suggests.

Simple augmented reality – on the 2-3 horizon

Previously cumbersome, augmented reality applications have become a lot easier to use, and the report gives some useful examples of education applications. Above all the report sees its value as providing “provide both powerful contextual, in situ learning experiences and serendipitous exploration and discovery of the connected nature of information in the real world”. For me the most interesting example in the report was corporate / military rather than educational:

Mechanics in the military and at companies like Boeing already use AR goggles while they work on vehicles; the goggles demonstrate each step in a repair, identify the tools needed, and include textual instructions as well. This kind of augmented experience especially lends itself to training for specific tasks.

Gesture-based computing – on the 4-5 year horizon

Wii and the iPhone between them brought the concept of gesture-based computing firmly into the mainstream, and the technology is improving at a rapid pace. Apparently, simulations are already in use that teach medical students how to use specific tools through gesture-based interfaces.

Visual data analysis – on the 4-5 year horizon

Visual data analysis promises to enable anyone to view, understand and interpret the concepts and relationships discoverable within huge and complex data sets. Its potential to support curiosity-based research is particularly noteworthy:

Ultra high-resolution displays allow teams of researchers to zoom in to examine specific aspects of the renderings, or to navigate along interesting visual pathways, following their intuitions and even hunches to see where they may lead.

Key drivers for the next 5 years

1. Reviewing the role of the educator, in terms of “sense-making, coaching and credentialing”, considered paramount in today’s “information overload” environment.
2. Ubiquity – complicated lives and conflicting demands emphasise the need for ubiquitous access to learning technologies and materials.
3. The increasing prevalence of cloud-based technologies and a much more decentralised IT support function.
4. Students are working in a more collaborative way. The report acknowledges this last trend as “not as widespread as the others listed here”, and I would say that there is some evidence that student behaviour is in fact becoming more competitive, maybe because of the economic conditions in which they expect to graduate.

Critical challenges for the next 5 years

1. Changes in the role of the academy and its responsibilities to students, to develop their critical faculties and mental flexibility.
2. Evaluative metrics, still largely citation-based, are lagging behind innovations in scholarly communications.
3. The ongoing rise in importance of digital media literacy “in every discipline and profession”.
4. The narrowing of institutional goals in response to budgetary challenges. In a context where there are fewer resources and staff to support the same or greater number of students, the report urges continued research into emerging technologies.

Academics and students in the Australian higher education sector, like their UK counterparts, are increasingly turning away from institutionally provided tools and services in favour of those developed outside the sector by both commercial enterprise and the open source community.

Despite mainstream adoption, there is limited knowledge about who is using which Web 2.0 technology in Australian higher education and why, and the aim of the Landscape study of shared infrastructure services in the Australian academic sector, prepared for UKOLN and JISC, is to establish precisely that.

The general view of services developed specifically for and by the higher education sector, is that they are not as robust, less user-friendly and not easily interoperable compared with services provided through the wider Web environment.

In some ways, Australia is in an advantageous position. Because it has lagged behind in the development of services, it is able to make use of American and British services such as Shibboleth as well as free open source Web 2.0 technologies, unhindered by legacy investments – a fast second.

The Australian Access Foundation (AAF) provides an interesting example of an HE-specific shared service competing with an open equivalent:

The AAF aims to provide authenticated secure access between participating institutions and service providers, based on Shibboleth. However the majority of users are using OpenID to manage their secure authenticated access to Web sites. This is a classic example of the tension between a rather heavy-weight solution designed specifically for the higher education sector versus a light-weight widely deployed Web approach.

Such examples lead the report to reflect on the future role of academic IT service departments:

IT service departments are realizing that they can no longer control the applications that are being used for teaching, learning and research. Instead IT departments need to monitor user requests, web service usage and new web service developments. Institutions and staff also need easy ways to monitor the current service of choice in order to provide the relevant research projects and between the university and its alumni. Universities and their IT departments need to be able to adopt to user demands, demonstrate flexibility, and provide support for multiple in-house and external services and applications.

Institutional IT departments need to evaluate different services and make recommendations. They need to identify when it makes sense to take advantage of services “in the cloud” such as Google Wave, rather than providing and mandating a local institutional or nationally-funded service that duplicates the freely-available and widely deployed service. Their role has changed from service development and service provision to one of providing technical support to people who need to engage with Web or cloud services – by setting up accounts, assisting with problems and recommending best services.

At the heart of the report is a table which gives the preferred tool and the top 3 reasons for adoption for diverse types of service, such as virtual worlds, blogs, so forth. Don’t expect any big surprises here though, or any in-depth insight. Arguably the most interesting element is the two service types identified as not having achieved wide adoption in Australian HE. These are personal start pages, of which iGoogle is the most popular, and annotation services for websites, for example Diigo. Some analysis as to when we might expect these to move into mainstream adoption would have been interesting.

Despite a questionable research methodology (consisting of a literature search, a blog and an online survey that had only 48 respondents), this is a concise and highly readable report of an HE sector that is similar to the UK but with a few interesting twists. But I couldn’t help feeling that a more qualitative approach might have produced a richer picture of complex motivations and usage narratives, whilst swerving around questions around representative sampling and self-selecting respondents.

We’ve received some exciting funding proposals for the Talis Incubator for Open Education scheme, where new ideas for Open Education can receive up to £15,000 in funding. However, we’ve also received a few emails from people who are struggling for time to meet the 31st December submission deadline. Seems that, like me, others are struggling to tie up loose ends before the Christmas holiday season.

It’s the first time we’ve run a scheme like this, so the holiday clash simply didn’t occur to us when we launched back in August. So, to put things right, we’re giving proposal teams an early xmas present and extending the deadline to January 31st 2010, to give most people a couple of weeks once back at work in the new year to fine-tune and submit their proposals. Like us, we guess you’d rather be concentrating on mince pies over the festive season than submitting bids!

If you’ve already submitted, and would have benefited from more time, don’t worry – you can resubmit at any time up to the new deadline – just resend your proposal to incubator@talis.com. If you’re still to start on your proposal, make sure you read through the guidelines on the Incubator web site.