Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning

Feedback and evaluation
Evaluation work was still ongoing at Sheffield at the time of writing, but
work was being undertaken to examine the impact of the project on
student satisfaction levels. Four modules for which the Library had
provided digitised offprints were evaluated. The results found that there
were no complaints about book availability and students in general
regarded the provision as good – with those ranking the system as
‘excellent’ outweighing those saying ‘fair’. They had very few problems
with access and the only comments were about printers not working.
They nearly all preferred electronic offprints to short loan but were
divided equally between electronic coursepacks and printed coursepacks.
Feedback was also gathered from the lecturers who had been involved
in the project. They were all enthusiastic and the Law and Psychology
Departments noted an increase in citations within assignments and a
general improvement in work. The final (internal) report will be
available to inform future policy.
Conclusions and future developments
The work at Sheffield is ongoing and over the academic year (2004/5)
the Library plan to offer training on TalisList for academic staff. This
will mean that staff are able to edit their own reading lists on the system.
Overall this initiative has been successful and the Library believes that
through online reading lists they now have a real presence in the virtual
learning environment.
Case study 3: The DELIVER project ‘Library
area’
The DELIVER project was part of the JISC-funded Digital Libraries and
Virtual Learning Environments (DiVLE) Programme discussed in some
detail in Chapter 2. There was considerable publicity generated by the
project as it evaluated three reading list management systems. However,
arguably a more important aspect of the project was the development of
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Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning Environment
a model of how library resources could be integrated into the VLE using
a ‘Library area’. This model is now being used by many WebCT courses
at the LSE and it forms part of the WebCT course template. The case
study demonstrates a practical way in which different types of library
resources can be integrated into the virtual learning environment.
Background and introduction
The DELIVER Project ran from October 2002 to June 2003 and was
jointly led by the LSE and De Montfort University. It examined digital
library and VLE integration by investigating three areas, including the
development of:
■
a generic library area within the VLE;
■
subject-specific resource areas within the VLE;
■
course-specific resource areas within the VLE.
6
While much of the publicity focused on the evaluation of three reading
list management systems, the project also undertook an extensive
analysis of users’ needs , focusing on academic staff and course designers
at both institutions (Harris, 2003a). One of the recommendations to
come out of this research was the need to establish a library area within
the VLE. The report argued (p. 10) that this should include the following
sections:
■
information skills and student training;
■
journal reading room for access to course supporting journal titles;
■
multimedia resources;
■
resource lists.
This recommendation was passed to the Centre for Learning Technology
at the LSE for development work. Some experimentation was carried out
using the tools already available in WebCT. The development also took
place at the same time that the LSE were revising the icons used in
WebCT. Therefore it was possible to design new icons to represent both
the Library area and the specific tools that it contained.
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Case studies and practical examples