FEATURE Education information
Personalising education
Siân Harris looks at the changing face of information resources and tools for higher-education students
A
n undergraduate student of a few decades ago might have headed off to a campus bookshop or perhaps a second-hand book sale armed with a list of core
textbooks to support his course. He would also have visited the university library to make use of the shelves of books there. It is likely that the bound journals were mainly ignored until the student embarked on a final-year research project or chose to go on to do postgraduate research.
In the area of information for research, of course, there have been dramatic changes in recent decades: bibliographic databases moving online, electronic library catalogues, e-journals, e-books, digitised primary source collections, data posted publicly online to name a few.
But these changes to research information have not happened in isolation. The arguments for public access and funder access to published research are well trodden but there is another audience for the latest research results that is much closer to the lab – the undergraduate students within a university. The internet has opened up opportunities to make links between raw data, published research and analysis in the form of blog posts and post-publication comment threads in ways that were not possible before. This is a trend that Timo Hannay, managing director of technology
business Digital
Science, sees as very positive. The products of Digital Science’s portfolio companies are targeted at research but he noted that they are
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heavily used by students – although mainly postgraduate – and that there is plenty of potential to do more.
‘Research literature can really enhance undergraduate education,’ he observed. Take Figshare, Digital Science’s data sharing platform, for example. Faculty members could use real datasets from such a resource to set data analysis homework. Indeed whole research projects could be set to find new patterns in openly-published datasets. ‘Being able to look at the experimental data is an incredibly important part of science education,’ he explained. ‘Part of what you need to learn as an undergraduate is how to use such tools. Being able to use a database is just as important as learning how to look something up in a journal.’
Similarly, in arts, humanities and social science subject areas, recent efforts to digitise a wide range of collections has opened up the possibility of using primary-source materials. Adam Matthew, an independent subsidiary of SAGE, for example, specialises in digitised primary-source material such as historical manuscripts and maps. ‘We try to make all our collections useful and appeal to a wide range of users,’ said Jennifer Kemp, editorial director of Adam Matthew. ‘The predominant groups using our resources are undergraduates and graduate researchers involved in the humanities and social sciences from institutions worldwide. We definitely target undergraduates and see the materials used in research and classroom work. For example, a tutor might use primary-source material in
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