Education information FEATURE


cameras, voice recognition, cloud data and new input devices. Everyone has a preferred learning style, so it would be ideal if learners in the near future could choose how they interact with information,’ they continue. Cox of Taylor & Francis agreed: ‘For some instructors and students, features like interactive quizzes and animations are crucially important. For others, they are not needed. It varies by subject area and level – but, in the most part, it varies at the individual level. It’s about allowing the choice.’


Providing interactive elements can also help to guide teaching. ‘Helping faculty to understand student behaviour is one of the


‘If you have a long delay between doing some work


and having it marked and returned you don’t really look at it other than to see


the grade’ Troy Williams, MacMillan New Ventures


exciting things about this type of interaction. Lecturers can see how students perform on tests and then can go over things that people struggle with,’ observed SAGE’s Shoman. However, this comes with a caveat about privacy and what is being done with such data. ‘Faculty has to make clear to students what tools do and what they expect from students,’ she added. Webster of Cengage observed that such features can also make the process more efficient for both learners and teachers: ‘It is clear from student surveys that students are looking for improvements in assessment. New learning technologies can be harnessed to increase student satisfaction rates in assessment. For instance, assessment technologies now automate marking, provide feedback to students who have made mistakes and randomise questions. Automation is key here, because it frees up tutor time and enables students and tutors to rethink their contact time and reorganise it around higher forms of learning,’ he said.


This is one area that MacMillan New


Ventures is looking at with its investment in Sapling Learning, a tool that provides online questions, instant specialised feedback on


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common mistakes and interactive grading in a range of STEM subjects at an undergraduate level. As Troy Williams, president of MacMillan New Ventures, explained, ‘if you have a long delay between doing some work and having it marked and returned you don’t really look at it other than to see the grade.


In contrast, he said: ‘Sapling has hired people with PhDs in the relevant subjects who write the questions, anything up to 2000 questions for a subject. The instructor can also write their own questions and Sapling can write questions to specifications, which then are available to all customers. Students love it and professors don’t have to spend time writing homework or marking it.’ He added that students who use Sapling outperform those who don’t. Another tool that he said is making a difference to student outcomes is the company’s student response system iClicker. Such tools help to make lectures more interactive; during lectures teaching staff can ask students questions that apply their knowledge. ‘It is about providing feedback loops, especially in large courses. Sometimes there are 1000+ students in a lecture so it is hard to get instructor feedback.’ The company also has a product called Late Night Labs that enables students to carry out virtual experiments using virtual versions of the equipment they use in their physical lab. ‘The outcomes are not hardwired. Late Night Labs calculates responses based on the database of 2,600 materials. We see people use it before and after lab sessions,’ he said.


Beyond campus walls


Digital technology is not only helping the teaching on traditional ‘brick and mortar’ courses. There is a growing trend for another type of learning, the MOOC (massive open online course).


Matthias Ick, managing director of Digital Education, has been gaining some experience in this area since the company invested in Veduca, a MOOC provider in Brazil. ‘We got involved first of all to learn more about MOOCs,’ he said. ‘The fantastic thing about MOOCs is that you can relatively easily get access to high-quality instructors. One professor to 20 or 30 thousand students really is a great way to serve more people,’ he observed. ‘MOOCs attract a different audience than traditional university courses, often a slightly older age group, perhaps professionals interested in learning about a specific topic. Much is video-based rather than text-based.’ He added that Brazil


is a particularly exciting market for this type of course. ‘Brazil


is a growing economy but fewer than five per cent of the people speak English.’ This, he said, is a challenge both when it comes to trading internationally and for using education information. The MOOCs are taking English- language lectures and annotating them into Portuguese. There is also the possibility to use MOOCs to learn English. ‘There is an appetite for it,’ said Ick. ‘The workforce can advance their career quite quickly if they invest in education. Their salary can go up by 40 per cent just by learning to speak English.’ At the moment, he said, the MOOC market is complementary to traditional higher education. ‘Currently there is no business model for quality content with MOOCs. There is an opportunity but it needs to be packaged right,’ he added. ‘MOOCs provide new possibilities to extend education beyond the walls of an institution or school in a new and exciting way. Elsevier is proactively exploring how best to surface relevant content in this way. Many of our existing arrangements with partners such as edX, or the permissions and document delivery provider SIPX, are enabling this to occur in a simple, quick, and centralised way,’ commented Siebert of Elsevier. Asked whether MOOCs are an opportunity or a threat for higher education and academic publishing, the responses were mixed.


‘One professor to 20 or 30 thousand students really


is a great way to serve


more people’ Matthias Ick, Digital Education


‘MOOCs are most definitely an opportunity with many new innovative partners. Elsevier will continue to explore the potential in our initial partnerships in this area. For example, we are working with edX beyond Anant Agarwal’s initial course and are providing textbooks for five new edX courses. The textbook content is available free to view online, with discounts offered to those students enrolled in the MOOCs to purchase the print or full electronic version of the book, if they wish,’ said Siebert. The Palgrave Macmillan Higher Education team noted that ‘MOOCs have the potential to massively expand the market for higher education globally. Having access to the world’s


JUNE/JULY 2014 Research Information 21


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