The NMC Horizon Report > 2017 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the NMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). This 14th edition describes annual findings from the NMC Horizon Project, an ongoing research project designed to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have an impact on learning, teaching, and creative inquiry in education. Six key trends, six significant challenges, and six important developments in educational technology are placed directly in the context of their likely impact on the core missions of universities and colleges. The three key sections of this report constitute a reference and straightforward technology-planning guide for educators, higher education leaders, administrators, policymakers, and technologists. It is our hope that this research will help to inform the choices that institutions are making about technology to improve, support, or extend teaching, learning, and creative inquiry in higher education across the globe. All of the topics were selected by an expert panel that represented a range of backgrounds and...
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Academic librarians are pleased with the progress they’ve made in leading their campuses to recognize the value of Open Educational Resources (OER). Now publishers are responding to OER with new learning platforms. It may be time for a new strategy.
Academic librarians should be proud of their progress in promoting the value of OER adoption as a benefit to students. Library-led textbook affordability projects on college campuses have grown in popularity since I first promoted,in a 2009 edition of this column, the idea of academic librarians taking the lead at their institutions to encourage a new approach I referred to as “curricular resource strategies.” The terminology didn’t catch on, but the idea of tackling the textbook pricing crisis with library-...
Read moreWhen David Oxtoby said in a 2011 speech that "facts matter," the president of Pomona College could not have known that "post-truth" would be the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2016.
Teaching students to separate fact from fiction has become a priority after an election in which false "news" played a large role. Fabricated stories like the one that claimed prominent Democrats were running a child-sex ring out of a pizza shop in the nation’s capital have drawn alarm.
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Information-Literacy/239264?cid=cp95
The following key issues, according to Mal Booth, University Librarian, need to be dealt with if we are ever to substantially improve, let alone revolutionise, academic publishing: speed (to access); improved reach (wider audience, not just the privileged); transparency of process; openness (for access); an expectation to use multi-media (sound, video, images); appropriate metrics; better facility and recognition for collaboration across disciplines; and interactivity.
Research data is an essential part of the scholarly record, and management of research data is increasingly seen as an important role for academic libraries. This article presents the results of a survey of directors of the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER) academic member libraries to discover what types of research data services (RDS) are being offered by European academic research libraries and what services are planned for the future. Overall, the survey found that library directors strongly agree on the importance of RDS. As was found in earlier studies of academic libraries in North America, more European libraries are currently offering or are planning to offer consultative or reference RDS than technical or hands-on RDS. The majority of libraries provide support for training in skills related to RDS for their staff members. Almost all libraries collaborate with other organizations inside their institutions or with outside institutions in order to offer or develop policy related to RDS. We discuss the implications of the current state of RDS in European academic research libraries, and offer...
Read moreThe 2017 EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT Issues are all about student success. Information technology in higher education continues to have many priorities and serve numerous constituents. IT service catalogs comprise hundreds of services to meet the many needs of faculty, students, and staff in various fields: the humanities; social, biological, and physical sciences; law; music; theater; art; business; and healthcare and allied professions. You name it, higher education offers it, and the IT organization supports it. Every academic and administrative area makes its own, separate demands on the IT organization, at any time and from any place. Despite the many and disparate requirements of each user and each technology, a predominant focus has risen to the top for higher education information technology in 2017, and that focus is student success. Colleges and universities are concentrating on student success to address concerns about the costs, value, and outcomes of higher education. Student success initiatives are making use of every available resource and opportunity and are involving every relevant stakeholder. Institutional technology is all three: resource, opportunity,...
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