Integrating Digital Resources into Online Learning
Environments to Support the Learner
Margaret Markland1 and Bob Kemp2
1 Manchester Metropolitan
University and 2Lancaster University
m.markland@mmu.ac.uk, r.u.kemp@lancaster.ac.uk
This paper describes an investigation into the ways in which tutors and
students identify and obtain online resources and examines some new tools and
services which are being developed to enable tutors to integrate the information
resources which support their teaching into online learning environments in
more efficient ways than are currently possible. Such resources might be found for example, in digital libraries,
on university library websites, in electronic journals or books, in reading
lists, on the Internet, in existing VLEs, or indeed in any kind of paper-based
resource. They could be text, images,
speech or music. Current needs and difficulties
are explored from the tutor and student perspectives, and what the tools are
aiming to provide to help with these issues is described. The paper concludes by suggesting why the
need for such tools will be come more urgent as the Government’s initiatives to
push teaching and learning out into work and community contexts gathers pace.
learning resources, learning support, online information resources,
e-learning, user behaviour, user needs
As part of its evaluation of the JISC Information Environment (IE), the
EDNER project conducted a series of studies into the ways in which tutors,
researchers and students identified and acquired the resources they needed to
support their teaching, learning and research activities. Previous JISC-funded studies such as the HyLife
Project (HyLife 2000) and the INSPIRAL Project (INSPIRAL 2001) had identified a
need for closer integration between the library and teaching communities, and
more particularly for a clearer understanding of the link between online
learning activities and the digital learning resources needed to support
them. How such integration was to be
achieved was as yet unclear. These
investigations then were motivated by JISC’s need to know whether the online
resources provided in the JISC IE were being used and valued among the teaching
and learning communities, or whether tutors were turning to other kinds of
resources to fulfil their needs.
The key objectives of these initial exploratory studies were
and
While the evaluation of the JISC IE was still in progress, JISC also
funded another Programme, known as Linking Digital Libraries with VLEs
(DiVLE). The formative evaluation of
this new Programme, the LinkER project, was carried out by the EDNER
team, and thus there were synergies between the two projects. The DiVLE Programme aimed to explore the
technical, pedagogical and organisational issues of linking digital library
systems and VLEs. Its specific
objectives were to
This Programme then was essentially exploratory and experimental; an
opportunity to try out ideas which might lead to the development of practical
tools and techniques which would help the tutor integrate a range of online
resources into the VLE at the point of need.
Thus it began to address some of the issues highlighted in the EDNER
studies and elsewhere.
The studies which form the first part of this paper used well-established
qualitative research methods, namely interviews with individuals and focus
group discussion to study “the behaviour of individuals in all the complexity
of their real-life situations” (Bawden, 1990, p27). Strategies involving artificially-constructed experiments or
large-scale questionnaire surveys were rejected, because although these may
reveal patterns of behaviour, insights into the reasons behind the behaviour
are more difficult to identify. What
was sought was closer to what Taylor and Bogdan (1984, p5) describe as
“research that produces descriptive data: people’s own written or spoken words
and observable behaviour”. Fifteen
tutors and fifteen students at Manchester Metropolitan University took part in
the interviews during Summer 2002 and Spring 2003. They represented teaching
staff from a broad cross section of teaching Departments, and both the
undergraduate and postgraduate student population. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, and then in order to
capture the richness of the data it was decided to present these as
vignettes. Vignettes have been
described by Stenhouse (1981) as the evaluator (or researcher) interpreting a
particular incident and using it to illustrate a more general situation. The individual vignette ‘speaks’ as if from
one person’s experience, though it may in fact be based upon the experiences of
several interviewees, who together represent a particular type or group. What is reported here is a synthesis of
these vignettes, and some key messages for those addressing the integration of
online learning support resources into online teaching environments.
The objectives of the interviews with tutors were to explore how they
learned about online information resources to support their teaching, what
kinds of resources they were selecting to support their online teaching, the
role of JISC IE resources in their choices, and what problems they were
encountering in integrating resources into the online environment.
Before exploring the results obtained it is worth noting some contextual
conditions. First, the use of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), in this
case WebCT, was relatively new within the institution, and although all of the
interviewees had undergone training in how to use the VLE and how to design and
develop teaching materials, the issue of embedding resources to support
learners had not been addressed in any greater depth than indicating that it
was possible to link to the institution’s library website. Staff appeared to be
well-motivated to use the VLE and the possibilities that online resources
offered. Most of those interviewed for the study were keen to provide links to
online resources to support students’ learning; one said this overcame the
excuse that her students couldn’t do the work because they couldn’t get hold of
the resource, ‘if it’s online they can get it when they need it’ she said.
The kinds of resources selected by staff were varied. Several staff
members had set up a ‘mini digital resource’ listing links to recommended
websites which students could explore for materials to underpin their assessed
coursework, and had placed these in a discrete location within the online
teaching module. There were also
examples of tutors extracting a particular website from a JISC subject gateway
or the URL of a favourite web page and placing it at the point of need within a
narrative, of the creation of new resources such as a glossary of scientific
terms with hyperlinks from the text in the teaching materials to the glossary
whenever a difficult or new term appeared, and of the creation of course
modules around particular websites.
Tutors praised the facility with which they could include new types of
media within their teaching, such as images or audio files, games and
interactive sites, and how this gave them new and different ways of approaching
syllabus material. For example, one
History tutor remarked upon the value of online historical maps. ‘When I talk about decolonisation’ he said
‘they can actually look at a map of where the countries were, where the empires
were’. They liked being able to access
very current information and to incorporate this into their learning materials
immediately before the lesson, and this was a particular asset to subjects such
as Law or Modern Politics. Almost all
of the tutors interviewed associated ‘online’ with ‘websites’. None had looked for ways of integrating
direct links to full text online journal articles or to individual items of
material within bibliographic databases provided by the university’s
traditional resource provider, the Library, nor had they discussed this type of
resource need with librarians. ‘I do
liaise with librarians’ said one, ‘but not for online resources or
websites. I mostly go to them for
training for myself and my students, and also when I need information about new
passwords’
Regarding their students, some claimed that the student library induction
session gave sufficient knowledge of the library and its services to equip
students for their academic careers.
The most that was usually provided for students within the VLE was a
high level icon link to the Library web page, or at best a pointer to the
appropriate Subject Resources section.
Some had not realised that this was possible. There seemed to be a ‘discreteness’ about all the resources
available through the library, whether paper based or online, as if accessing
these was a separate activity from working in the online learning environment,
and not something that might be integrated into learning materials at the
precise point of need.
Apart from the Virtual Training Suite, few tutors were using resources
from the JISC IE, although several
claimed to know about them. There were examples of tutors extracting a
particular website from a JISC subject gateway, but for the most part these
resources did not feature. This may be partly explained as an awareness issue,
with the point above about the lack of contact with librarians regarding online
resources being significant.
The kinds of problems and issues faced by tutors can be summed up as
currency, quality, and effects on working practice. Several tutors had had
problems when integrating websites.
They noted how frequently URLs were relocated, though few made regular
methodical checks to ensure that links were still live. ‘I do housekeeping during the summer
vacation’ was the only example cited of such behaviour. None mentioned using link checking
software. Some complained of the
impermanence of websites and the impact that this had had upon their use of
online resources. One had lost a whole
course module because of this. They
were also unhappy that information seeking on the Internet was such a
time-consuming process compared to searching through on-line journals and
bibliographic resources. ‘Online is a
lot of work’ said one. ‘It’s invisible
work, and my colleagues think I do less.’
One noted a decline in the availability of free content on commercial
subject gateways saying that he now had to pay to access high quality materials
upon which he had previously relied.
None seemed aware that copyright law applied to web-based materials as
well as to print based.
Some interesting discussions on the quality of learning resources
obtained from the Internet were triggered.
All of the tutors were confident of their own ability to evaluate the
quality of the content of websites, and one claimed to be ‘impressed by the web
explosion’, but there was anxiety about the skills of their students. ‘They might love it for chat and their own
personal ends, but I’m not sure for work’ being a typical comment. Several quoted instances of students
incorporating inappropriate online material into their coursework. One described students as ‘confused’ about
what ‘quality’ meant when it came to online material, claiming that this was ‘a
bit like not discerning the difference between a popular magazine and an
academic journal’. Several were
surprised that while students seemed able to evaluate the academic quality of
paper-based resources, they were less able to transfer their skills to the
online environment. There were
discrepancies between how tutors had responded to this anxiety. One approach was to offer ‘ad hoc’ advice to
individual students when the need arose, usually in response to the selection
of an inappropriate resource. Other
tutors integrated information skills training into their teaching, but usually
only when this formed part of the curriculum of the subject area. A few tutors had made use of JISC’s Virtual
Training Suite for this activity because the training modules are subject
based, and when there was no appropriate subject module available, a generic
package such as Netskills was used instead.
It was not uncommon though for tutors to take the view that this sort of
training was not their responsibility.
One pointed out that she had neither the time nor the skill set to teach
her students evaluation skills, which she described as ‘an add-on for which I
wouldn’t be paid’ and also suggested that students may be reluctant to
undertake training which did not carry with it the reward of ‘counting towards
their degree’.
The objective of the interviews with students was to discover the processes
they would use to find resources to inform a piece of assessed coursework, and
to see what role online resources played in this activity. There were three clear favourite strategies;
either they took a reading list of recommended books and journals to the
library, or they searched the library OPAC and web page for journal articles
and online databases, or they went to the internet and carried out a keyword
search using Google. The only difference between students was which strategy
they chose first.
Their heavy reliance upon a reading list proved a double-edged
sword. On the one hand students were
confident that the list contained high quality key resources because their
lecturers had recommended them, and as one remarked, “Lecturers will tell you where
to go, and it saves legwork”. Yet at
the same time there was a definite “down side” to reading lists consisting
mostly of books and journals. Students
complained and even seemed to panic when the particular recommended book was
already out of the library on loan or was missing, and although they might
browse other books with the same shelf mark, they were not confident that an
alternative would be just as good.
There was also a marked reluctance to visit other academic libraries in
the search for books and printed journals despite the fact that there are
several within a radius of a very few miles from their home site library. Convenience was the major factor here, and
also familiarity with the layout of the physical library. One student remarked that she was sure that
the main Manchester public library held good material, but “it’s so big and
scary and I can’t find my way round. I
always end up asking someone and feeling like a fool because I couldn’t find it
myself.”
Despite the concern which tutors expressed about the ability of their
students to evaluate what they found on the Internet, there were some
encouraging messages from the conversations with the students themselves. All of them were aware that there could be
problems with the quality of the information they might find on the Internet in
the context of using it for academic work.
They had evaluation strategies such as finding out whether sites had
been ‘vetted’, or judging on the basis of domain names, by using sites
recommended by their peers, or by finding out who the author was. They were concerned about whether Internet
resources were ‘reliable’, and complained of being overwhelmed by the volume of
material available, much of which was irrelevant to their learning needs. In fact they emerge as quite cautious and
conservative in their selection of resources.
Despite these encouraging signs the strongest reasons given by far for
using the Internet were not good academic ones. They were the speed with which information could be retrieved,
and the convenience of working in this way.
These were perceived as definite advantages in an online resource and
outweighed arguments for quality. As
one said “I use the internet because I’m lazy, because I don’t want to have to
get up and go to the library and you know if you find an article on the
internet you can just print it straight off instead of having to search through
journal issues and photocopy them.”
The picture which emerges is one of enthusiasm within both the teaching and
learning communities for using online resources to support and underpin
learning. The reasons for this
enthusiasm are both good and bad, and there is some cause for concern. Reading lists emerge as a key source of
materials to support learning, but when these contain mostly paper based
resources, the amount of effort required to access them seems to lead to a
trade off between getting the recommended resource or uneasily making do with
an alternative. It appears that the processes that tutors use to find out about
online resources do not draw upon all the support available to them, with a
lack of use of the traditional support services such as the librarians in this
context and as yet no sign of impact from the new learning support services
both within and without the institution There is also concern that it is
impossible to predict the permanence of websites which impacts upon their
usefulness as resources to support learning. Quality is a major issue, with a
critical tension between the desire of staff to maintain control of the
standard of resources and that of students to get easy access to
resources.
The samples in these interviews were small, but the use of interviewing
as a technique ensures a rich picture of user behaviour and attitudes. The sample may not be generalisable to the
wider population, but the results do indicate some clear messages which are
very relevant to the kinds of questions to which the JISC was seeking
answers.
Certainly within the library community there has been an awareness for
some time now that the move to teaching in the online environment presents
great opportunities to integrate library based resources into the VLE to
enhance the learning experience at the time and point of need. What has proved difficult is making this
happen. A review of published library
and education literature on this subject, (Markland 2002) which identified
practice and experience in the UK and elsewhere showed that much of the initiative
for integration was coming from the library community. Examples of initiatives in which library and
teaching staff had worked together to integrate specific digital library
resources into a particular teaching module in a virtual learning environment
were not numerous. Mostly these seemed
to emanate from situations where learners were working at a distance, rather
than providing for online learning for campus-based students, a model which is
becoming familiar in Higher Education Institutions.
In an attempt to address the difficulties of information seeking and
integration into online learning environments, the DiVLE Programme took some
first steps towards exploring ways of developing and providing easy to use
tools to facilitate such activities.
Nine projects were funded to develop and test software to provide, among
other things, tools to
The Programme aimed therefore to satisfy both the impatient student and
the busy tutor. The Programme was of short duration, only ten months, but what
was achieved is promising for tutors and learners alike.
It was shown, for example, that it is indeed feasible to provide a tool
within a VLE which can search across a mix of online resources
simultaneously. The PORTOLE tool
developed by Leeds University (Sotiriou et al. 2003) can search one or more library
catalogues, the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), an in-house database of
subject-based listings of electronic subscriptions, selected external websites,
and Google, and then retrieve a single set of links. Next the tutor can select resources from the list, annotate these
with supplementary information, sort and group them, mark them according to
level of importance, and integrate the list into the VLE at the point of
need. The list can be edited at any
time by the tutor but not by the students, and at the outset the tutor can
select which resources to search. What
the student sees when working in any particular unit is a list of learning
resources of various types which have immediate relevance to that unit;
resources which will enhance his understanding and facilitate learning. The list might be a mixture of books,
journal materials and websites, might encompass a range of visual and audio
media, and will therefore bring together ‘library OPAC searching’ and ‘internet
searching’ activities.
Other projects such as the EnCoRe project at the University of Derby
(Keady et al. 2003) tested the possibility of linking directly from within the
VLE to full text online materials such as journal articles or book
chapters. So instead of the tutor
simply ‘flagging up’ an electronic journal article which the student then had
to retrieve through the library catalogue or other service provider, perhaps
going through an authentication process to do so, there would be a seamless one
click link between a point in the teaching unit in the VLE and the
article. The underlying software would
carry out the process of searching for the article and authenticating the
student. Furthermore, if the student
did not have the necessary permission to access the article from within
university resources, the software would tell the student where else it could
be obtained or bought.
A further facility which this project explored was the feasibility of
linking tutors to a digitisation and copyright clearance service. This would enable the tutor, for example, to
select a particular chapter in a print-based textbook, and have this converted
into digital format for embedding within her VLE at the point of need. Some examples had been found of tutors
carrying out this type of activity on an ‘ad hoc’ basis, and there was concern
that this might infringe copyright law.
A further problem was tutors paying to have texts digitised with
copyright clearance when the University library had already done so. This tool therefore, would both ensure that
copyright law was not infringed, and also match what was being requested with
what was already available within the institution. It would also make tutors aware of the cost of their ‘course
packs’ of digitised materials. In the
event, this facility was not completed within the project timeframe, though it
was clear that it was possible to provide this type of service.
Another focus was to test ways in which teaching materials created for
use in one e-learning environment could be offered for reuse by others, perhaps
using a different VLE platform, by means of the library catalogue. The Talking Systems project at the
University of Wales College, Newport (Noyes 2003) for example suggested a
scenario where a Computer Science lecturer might observe that her students were
struggling with a particular mathematical concept that she was unable to cover
during her teaching, and yet which they need to understand in order to complete
an assignment. They suggest that she
might collate her existing resources on the topic or put together a list of
library resources on the subject. She
may suspect though, that her colleagues in the School of Mathematics have an
e-learning resource to teach this particular concept, but without a username
and password for their VLE she has no access to it. The project went on to explore how the metadata used to describe
e-learning resources and library resources could be cross-mapped, so that the
library catalogue could be made to present not just the usual library
resources, but e-learning objects too.
The Computer Science lecturer would be able to search her library
catalogue in the usual way and retrieve from it a mathematics tutorial suitable
for her students.
The impact of technological change upon the working practices of tutors,
students and librarians was something that all of the projects had to
consider. As another DiVLE project,
DEVIL reported “One cannot force systems on to users and expect them to be
happy with them.” (DEVIL 2003) It
became clear, for example, that the annual practice of sending reading lists to
the library so that resources could be made available for the start of the
academic year would no longer fit with the concept of a resource list that was
being constantly updated and revised.
There may be a need for the digitisation of key book chapters at any
time of the year, for copyright permissions to be obtained for online materials
not held by the library, for newly created e-learning resources to be added to
the library catalogue.
There was some discussion too of the issue of ‘trust’ or ‘altruism’ in
the context of whether tutors were in fact willing to share the e-learning
resources which they had created. A
considerable reluctance was identified to doing this and a real fear surfaced
among academics that they might not be recognised as the author of their
work. It became clear too that asking
tutors to place their learning objects on a library catalogue meant asking them
to create the metadata needed to
describe the object. The metadata
creation process calls for certain skills which are very familiar to librarians
but less so to tutors. Projects
discovered that they could not assume that tutors were willing to spend time
acquiring these skills or creating the metadata, and that when they did so, the
metadata was often of insufficient quality.
Librarians however, they found, did not always have sufficient
understanding of the underpinning pedagogies to describe the learning resource
accurately, and so they too were unlikely to create high quality metadata for
this new kind of material without the assistance of a subject tutor.
It became clear that there was more to bringing new tools to tutors than
simply presenting them with a technological possibility. Full account must be taken of how the tools
would impact upon the workload and practice of the individual tutor, and of how
the smooth integration of such tools might be affected by different
institutional cultures.
In the foreword to the UK Government’s Department for Education and
Skills publication ‘Towards a Unified e-learning strategy’ Charles Clarke, the
Education Secretary stated that ‘e-learning has the potential to revolutionise
the way we teach and how we learn’. He
goes on the present a vision of integrated learning opportunities which
permeate not only the traditional centres of learning – schools, colleges and
universities - but also the workplace, specialist colleges and the home, a
vision which includes many learners who currently have difficulty accessing
learning opportunities.
Students understand that underpinning resources from the online
environment whether provided through their library services or by their tutors,
bring with them a stamp of academic quality.
So their general expectation is that high quality resources to support
their learning will be provided for them, in locations convenient to them,
whether online or place-based. They
consider this an essential part of the university experience. Clarke however, has laid down the challenge
of providing for new kinds of learners, and particularly those studying away
from the ‘safety’ of the traditional environment with its efficient support
network. Taking the learning environment
to the learner wherever he or she is based means taking the resources to
support learning too or providing access to them in some other way. It means taking learning to people who are
preoccupied with their work or their home responsibilities as well as their
learning, and few learning in the home or workplace will have the luxury of an
academic library to visit and the time to go and browse the shelves. Such students in particular will benefit
greatly from the kinds of facilities which these tools promise, and that
promise is a much closer integration between their online course and all of the
core resources which they need to support it as and when they need them.
The studies with tutors illustrated that few of the JISC funded resources
within the JISC IE had yet made their way into individual modules within an
online environment. What was uncovered
though, was a great keenness among tutors to integrate a wide range of online
resources into their VLEs and much enthusiasm for enhancing their teaching in
new and exciting ways. However it also
became apparent that this enthusiasm brings with it a need for new skills and
new tools if the time-consuming and weighty process of integration is to be
facilitated.
Students too like the online environment. They are keen to use digital resources. The internet is one of their preferred sources of information to
support their learning, because they like the speed with which search engines
can deliver information to them, this despite occasionally being overwhelmed by
the sheer volume of material retrieved, or confused about the quality of what
they find. It would appear that the
ideal situation for the student would be to have resources to support their
learning delivered to them online with the speed of a search engine, and the ‘quality
stamp’ of their university library or their tutor’s recommendation.
The projects in the DiVLE programme are a first step towards realising
the kinds of services needed by the teaching and learning communities if these
aims are to be achieved. Most projects
produced explorations and prototypes; an opportunity to ‘try out’ ideas to see
what might work and what might prove more difficult. They offered a chance to feed these new possibilities into the
teaching and learning communities, and to solicit their reaction. Many of the projects have already had a
favourable response from tutors, and indeed some have had expressions of
interest from the international community.
Others will require further development and refinement if they are to
emerge as tools which will be taken up with enthusiasm. Whatever the outcome for the individual
projects, this programme has contributed to both a body of technological
knowledge and an enhanced understanding among tutors of how the resources they
need to support their learners might be better integrated into their networked
learning environments.
As government policy drives the expansion of an ever more widely
dispersed student body, the need to understand the behaviour patterns of tutors
and learners in the online environment and to provide new services to support
them will become more pressing. New
kinds of demand are already emerging and tools are being developed to address
them.
Integrating digital resources into online learning environments
challenges both the tutor and the technologist, and further study is needed to
understand the needs of tutors and students and how these can best be
served. Only by gaining such knowledge
can the technologist ensure that the tools being developed meet these needs,
and facilitate the integration of digital resources into online learning
environments.
Thanks are due to Jill Bentley, PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan
University, who carried out the student interviews and focus group as part of
the EDNER project, and made her data available for this paper.
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