DM Initiative - Executive Briefing

Digital Marketplace: Serving Imperatives of Educational Organizations

The Digital Marketplace is a collection of web services and integration protocols designed to address the challenges that have inhibited the wide-spread adoption of digital learning resources in Higher Education.

Chief among these challenges to wide-spread adoption of digital learning resources are:

  • Resources just repurposed from print to web lack learning appeal
  • Resources making compelling use of rich media are in short supply
  • Finding modular resources needed to build next generation courses is difficult
  • Distribution of resources from providers to faculty and students is inefficient.

Yet, at the same time, demand for next generation learning resources is growing:

  • In spite of the limitations of current digital learning resources, faculty increasingly are demanding more "native" digital resources
  • Students, who are "Digital Natives", are experts at finding interesting, relevant course materials
  • Institutions are beginning to invest in academic technologies as a means to meet budget and graduation pressures
  • Content providers are proliferating with a growing array of new content offers.

These important trends highlight a growing frustration over the inability to simply and quickly find and put compelling digital resources in the hands of faculty and students as course materials.

A key reason for this growing frustration is the inefficiency of current digital resource distribution:

  • The rapid growth of the availability of digital learning resources has created a mysterious, complex, inefficient ecosystem of content providers, aggregators, application developers, and consumers inhibiting the easy discovery of, access to, and consumption of innovative learning resources
  • The challenge is a mix of issues:
    • It's a green field out there with little or no standards to guide players in the ecosystem
    • Providers are leading the charge, not institutions, resulting a models designed to protect the interests of the ecosystem, not necessarily the institutions
    • Product and brand identity protection dictate distribution systems be developed with a supply-side focus, not buy-side
    • Lack of fact-based insight into how best to improve learning outcomes means there is little consensus on where investments will best pay-off

Until these issues are addressed, the wide-spread discovery of, access to, and consumption of innovative resources for the classroom will not live up to its promise.

The Digital Marketplace is being developed and implemented to address these frustrations and enable rapid adoption of innovative content for the classroom.

More specifically, the Digital Marketplace is a new digital network, or exchange, for institutions, faculty, and students to access digital learning resources that:

  • Offers faculty and students a convenient and less costly means of discovery, acquisition, and consumption of learning content than today's search and discover offerings
  • Offers the providers of digital learning resources a simple, standardized, low-cost means to connect to institutions, faculty, and students.

Several imperatives guide the development of the Digital Marketplace:

  1. Accessibility of academic content: Instructional, library resources, and student services content (e.g. academic content formatted in books, journals, guidebooks, websites, multimedia learning objects,) must be in an information format that effectively, efficiently, scaleably, sustainably, and affordably enables renderings that can be used by students and faculty with disabilities in compliance with federal and state laws and executive orders. This content is currently purchased by students and/or the organization and does not comply with accessibility requirements. Educational organizations have significant and growing litigation risks.

    NEED: Both students and faculty need simple, user-friendly services to search, find, and acquire academic content across publishers and open resource services that provides content renderings which comply with accessibility requirements.

  2. Affordability of academic content: The student and legislative demands to reduce the costs of academic content is a significant and growing demand and priority for all universities. High costs of textbooks result in reduced access to education (students can't afford the total cost of education) and it reduces the quality and success of their education (students don't buy the required textbooks, don't learn the materials, and don't perform to their capabilities). The reduced access and quality of education costs the university significant funds by interfering with a student's ability to graduate in a timely and successful manner.

    NEED: Both students and faculty need simple, user-friendly services to search, find, and acquire academic content across publishers and open resource services that provides more affordable and valued options.

  3. Choice of academic content: A students' educational success is dependent upon many complex factors. One significant class of factors that affects instructional and learning success is the quality and compatibility of the learning content to the learning needs of the students. Current practices significantly restrict faculty choice of academic content for teaching their courses and student choice of academic content for learning. The growing availability of multimedia tutorials that include individualized assessment of student learning needs are not easily found, reviewed, and selected through the current textbook selection process.

    NEED: Both students and faculty need simple, user-friendly services to search, find, and acquire academic content across publishers and open resource services to meet their individual teaching and learning needs.

  4. Digital delivery of academic content: To serve the educational needs, many universities are initiating new programs, for example, expanding their online degree programs. The online nature of degree programs will provide significantly greater access to the working professionals. Professional doctoral programs and masters degree programs are ones that will particularly require online delivery. Currently, most universities do not have an effective, efficient, scaleable, sustainable, affordable, and secure means to deliver publisher content in digital/online formats to its students. Books, coursepacks, manuals, and other academic content are still frequently sold to students through local bookstores, requiring online students to become on-campus students for some and sometimes deal-breaking time.

    NEED: Both students and faculty need simple, user-friendly services to search, find, and acquire digital academic content across publishers and open resource services to meet their individual teaching and learning needs.

  5. Leveraging teaching expertise and instructional practices: To improve academic effectiveness and efficiencies. The expert selection of academic content in the design of effective course curriculum occurs pervasively but is not efficient and as reliable as it could be. In addition, many faculty have authored excellent digital curriculum that cannot be easily discovered and distributed within a particular university environment. There are a variety of circumstances where the faculty assigned to teach a course have not been provided the time or the support to select the high quality academic content and organize the content into effective course curriculum. Newly hired tenure track or adjunct faculty given a new teaching assignment two weeks before the semester starts would greatly benefit from a library of academic content already in use by their colleagues. Each semester, students are challenged to learn skills and concepts which might be better enabled by some academic resources beyond those assigned by the faculty. There is not effective, efficient, scaleable, or sustainable mechanism for students to share what enables their learning.

    NEED: Both students and faculty need simple, user-friendly services to search, find, and acquire academic content and expert advice across publishers, faculty, students, and open education services that enable them to effectively and efficiently learn from the experiences and expertise of others in teaching and learning.

Textbook Affordability and Congressional Recognition of the Digital Marketplace Project

These needs are not unique to California and the recent US Congressional Advisory Committee for Student Financial Assistance (ACSFA) focused on the nationwide issue of the affordability of textbooks. Within this comprehensive report, which was produced after a year-long student and three field hearings, the committee recognized CSU's Digital Marketplace initiative as the model for a national digital marketplace.

For more information about the ACSFA's recommendations, you can get the full report at: http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/acsfa/turnthepage.pdf

The Digital Marketplace Project: Scope, Strategy and Deployment

Scope:

The Digital Marketplace (DM) Project will put in place a next generation web-based infrastructure that directly addresses three high priority needs of institutions of higher education:

  • Improve learning outcomes through accelerating teaching innovations
  • Improve the accessibility of learning materials to students
  • Significantly reduce the cost of learning materials (textbooks) to students

The project focuses first on enabling cost-effective discovery and distribution of digital learning resources to faculty, students and institutions. Appendix A provides a scenario of these initial Digital Marketplace services.

Meeting the needs of affordability, accessibility, and leaning innovation requires that the DM effort broaden this initial scope in order to encompass the many ways that students, faculty, and institutional stakeholders access and use learning resources. The DM infrastructure must enable a flexible, convenient and cost effective exchange of learning resources between many providers and many consumers. With that exchange, new and unique knowledge about the how resources are being used by faculty and students and what outcomes are produced will become available. This information can enable valuable correlations to be made between which digital learning resources are selected and acquired and specific learning outcomes.

Strategy:

With a scope of work this large and complex and potential impact this pervasive and important, it is imperative that the DM engage with all the stakeholders (publishers, retailers, faculty, students, librarians, IT organizations, administrators, etc.) in designing, building, and deploying the DM infrastructure. Key elements of this collaborative strategy include taking into account changes in faculty and student behavior and administrative practice and ensuring a viable economic outcome exists for all participants.

The Digital Marketplace workgroup, composed of faculty who are currently using digital resources, CIO's, librarians, accessibility experts, and bookstore managers is actively working on the design and implementation of the Digital Marketplace.

Recent technology innovations have made it possible for the Digital Marketplace Project to adopt a collaborative project structure and manage an alliance of corporate and institutional participants in developing the Digital Marketplace infrastructure. Technology companies who have contributed to the DM project include:

  • Oracle
  • CISCO
  • Sun
  • Apple
  • HarvestRoad
  • Desire2Learn
  • Microsoft
  • VitalSource
  • Softchalk

Publishing companies who have contributed include:

  • John Wiley & Sons
  • Pearson Education
  • Cengage
  • Houghton Mifflin
  • Bedford Freeman Worth
  • Guinti

MERLOT already manages an alliance of higher education institutions that include California Community Colleges, State University of New York System, Minnesota State Universities and Colleges, University of North Carolina System, Oklahoma Board of Regents, Tennessee Board of Regents, and eight other state systems. Many of the institutions who are partners in MERLOT are encouraged to adopt and use Digital Marketplace. We expect to form an Advisory Committee under DM leadership to plan the expansion of the project to meet the needs of universities everywhere..

Deployment

Digital Marketplace development is under the stewardship of the California State University Chancellor's Office, Academic Services. It will deployed incrementally by providing users with an initial capability, followed by a regular sequence of releases with new tools and capabilities in the following order:

  1. Resource List Service for faculty members

    A new web-based search services that enables faculty members to simplify and extend their ability to discover digital content resources from university internal sources (e.g. library materials, institutional repositories, accessibility office, etc.) and a variety of publishers and other providers and prioritize that discovery based on user preferences. Once found, the faculty will be able to organize their selected resources into a "resource list" that can be accessed via the LMS (e.g. Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, etc.) or other applications that can consume web services. The faculty will be able to find many different types of materials that are used in teaching courses, including syllabi, tutorials, simulations, animations, lectures/presentations, library books, textbooks, e-books, e-journals, exams/quizzes, learning assignments, reference materials, image collections, online courses, training and workshop materials, and other digital libraries.

  2. Acquisition capability for students to obtain materials directly from a resource list

    Students will be given the means to acquire resources (by purchasing, borrowing, or downloading for free) from the list of resources created by faculty members using the Reading List Management capability. A variety of pricing paradigms now offered by individual publishers and innovative new paradigms will be supported through this capability. This flexibility will provide greater control to the student for buying just what he/she wants in a manner best for him/her. The Delivery Network will have to be in place to enable the acquisition transactions.

  3. Data resources for evaluating effectiveness and relating content-related learning activities to learning outcomes

    Information about the content selected by the faculty and acquired by the students will be collected in the DM and made available for summary and analysis. This data warehousing and analysis capability will allow the faculty to use outcomes to assess student progress and attainment, tailor suggestions for improvement or enhancement, and over time develop innovative and effective approaches to discovering and choosing content resources, as well as to relating these choices to student objectives and performance.

The Digital Marketplace: Campus Roles and Actions

There are a variety of ways that institutions and campuses can participate in the design, development, and deployment of the Digital Marketplace. The key to participation will be the selection of the activity that serves campus needs and DM project needs and both campus and Chancellor's Office provide the staffing, resources, and expertise to reasonably and reliably execute their participation plans. The following list describes the possible activities campuses can choose to implement.

Evaluation and Pilots

  • Faculty evaluation of the quality and usability of the resource list services prototype
  • Student evaluation of the quality and usability of the resource list services prototype
  • Pilot project for campus integration of resource list services prototype into their LMS for a few courses
  • Pilot project for campus integration of resource list services prototype into their library services and or other portal or ePortfolio services
  • Participate in the case study project for using digital resources (see Appendix B)

Resource List Trials

  • Students in a few courses acquire free and fee course materials from the resource list
  • Faculty evaluate the discovery of accessible content through the resource list.
  • Participate in the faculty case study project for using digital resources (see Appendix B)

We believe a reasonable and manageable plan will be to have campuses participate in the DM project in phases and on activities that they are committed to complete. The DM project staff are available to answer questions. For more information, contact members of the DM project team.


Appendix A - The Digital Marketplace Scenario

The Digital Marketplace is being designed with the needs of faculty and students focusing our efforts. The following narrative will describe how faculty and students will be able to fulfill their teaching and learning needs through the Digital Marketplace services.

FACULTY ROLE

DISCOVERY:
Professor Plum logs into his LMS during the summer to begin to build the collection of resources he will want his students to use in the Biology 101 course he's teaching in the fall. It's been 5 years since he taught the introductory level course so he's interested in reviewing what's available in the field. Within the LMS website, he goes to the page for building his resource list and clicks on "Search for Resources". He types in a key concept he'll be covering in the course and a hit list of materials from 6 different publishers is generated along with free materials from MERLOT. The descriptions of the materials includes title, author, abstract, publisher collateral, type of resource (book, article, multimedia, etc), indication of its ability to be rendered in an accessible (section 508 compliant) format, and the different delivery formats and prices (hard copy text book, custom book, eBook to own, eBook to rent).

While looking for instructional content, Professor Plum also examines some of the professional development resources he can use help him prepare to teach successfully. He finds a number of handbooks on teaching the net-generation and he selects one for his summer reading, which CSULB gets a discount because of a bulk purchase.

PREVIEW:
Professor Plum selects 10 different recourses to review in more detail. He clicks on the PREVIEW button and a window pops ups indicating that since he is a faculty in good standing at his university, he will have full electronic access to the eBook for a 72-hour period, starting whenever he wishes. After previewing 10 materials, he selects 5 for his course, a textbook, and a chapter from another book, a tutorial on using EXCEL, and 2 multimedia simulations. He also gets to preview the net-generation handbook as well.

SELECTION:
Profession Plum saves his selections of materials for his students and writes notes (annotations) about the resources he's selected to use. He notices that the book, chapter, and tutorial can be rendered in an accessible format but the 2 multimedia simulations are only 80% accessible. Professor Plum contacts the campus Center for Students with Disabilities to learn what he needs to do to provide alternative curriculum to the visually impaired student he'll have in his class. Finally Professor Plum examines the "student view " of the resource list and sees that the textbook is offered in an eBook-to-own version for 50% of the hard copy text and the eBook-to-rent is only $15.99 for the semester. With all these options for access to the materials, he's hoping all his students will use the materials.

BUY:
Professor Plum puts the net-gen book in his shopping cart and buys it with his credit card


STUDENT ROLE
BUYING INSTRUCTIONAL RESOURCES:
When Jane Student gets access to the LMS for her Biology 101 course, she navigates to the Resource List to check out what she'll need to buy. As a student with a vision disability, she has had a challenge of getting the materials in a format she can use in a timely manner. She reviews the resource list and sees that the textbook and tutorial are in an accessible format and is pleased. She then reviews the different types of style sheets her university has certified to render the content in an accessible manner. She likes the choices and decides on the size, contrast, colors, and layout that suits her needs. Jane is considering becoming a biology major so she decides to put the eBook-to-buy in her shopping cart and the tutorial in her shopping cart. She buys the resources online with her credit card and stores the resources in her campus ePortfolio. For the two multimedia resources, there's a note for her stating that the Center for Students with Disabilities will provide an aid to work with Jane on the portions of these resource that are not accessible to her.

In the 4th week of the semester, Jane realizes she's having trouble with one of the key concepts in biology. She goes to the Digital Marketplace in her LMS and searches for additional materials that might do a better job in helping her learn the concept. She finds a student workbook that has the background information she needs and it can be rendered in the accessible format she prefers. Jane buys it online.

BUYING STUDENT DEVELOPMENT RESOURCES:
While Jane was looking for her course materials, she saw that the resource list also include a collection of online materials that could help her learn more about the different jobs you can get with a biology degree, expected salaries, and different types of professional opportunities. She also sees that her state provides forgivable student loans for students who go into teaching in that state. Being a registered student, she can preview the career development material for 3 hours. Jane likes the book and adds it to her shopping cart. She also sees an e-handbook on how to succeed in college without going broke. She also puts this in her shopping cart and buys the materials with her credit card.