Colleges, K-12s Need More Collaboration

Administrators on both the college and K-12 level agree they need to collaborate more. The problem is few actually do.

A recent telephone survey of 104 public school superintendents and 101 leaders of public and private two- and four-year colleges and universities found that most superintendents (90%) and college system leaders (80%) say they believe their collaboration is extremely or very important. At the same time, just 33% of superintendents and 34% of postsecondary leaders say they do collaborate extremely or very effectively.

“K-12 is much more top-down than higher ed and decisions can be made more quickly,” Jacqueline King, director of higher education collaboration for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, told Education Week. “This can be frustrating to K-12 to have higher-ed people want to talk [issues] to death.” On the other hand, college administrators often believe K-12 leaders don’t understand they just “can’t snap fingers and make things happen,” she added.

The research, The Collaborative Imperative, also showed both groups tend to have different priorities and question whether their counterparts view collaboration as that important. Superintendents want to see an improvement in the development of teachers and in ways to align instruction with higher ed, while postsecondary leaders are focused on improving students’ transition into college and reducing the need for remedial courses. College administrators tend to blame budget constraints as a barrier to collaboration with their public school counterparts, who say they are just too busy to make time for collaboration.

“Although not insurmountable, these barriers especially require fresh and innovative thinking about how resources can be marshaled or pooled if we are serious about functioning as a coherent educational system, rather than separate sectors,” the report said. “We especially recognize the promise of regional collaboration, organized among schools and colleges who share students and teachers in common and who, therefore, have clear connections to shared outcomes and compelling overlapping interests.”

RFI -- POD

We are seeking your input. As part of our new LLC and plans for upcoming pilots, we are looking to develop regional POD (print-on-demand) capabilities. We recently formed a taskforce to assist with evaluating some of our options and choices in this area. That group is in the process of scheduling its first meeting (around the upcoming RUSH period that comes with each new semester). I thought it would be useful to extend a few questions out to the larger world on this topic.

We plan to begin piloting POD services early in 2009. If you are a store, or a customer of a bookstore (faculty, student or other stakeholder), or perhaps a publisher providing content to stores, what would you want to see in terms of POD services or capabilities at the college store level? We have some different options for implementing regional POD, but are there scalable models for implementing POD that you have been thinking about? If you already use POD, what criteria did you use to pick your solution or approach? If there is other information you think the taskforce might find useful as they develop an RFP and evaluate options, please let me know. You can post your comments here, or send me e-mail directly. This is an opportunity to provide input into our process at the earliest of stages (even before we have our first official taskforce meeting), and thus an opportunity to make a difference.

Making a better blog...

I am traveling today, but want to throw out a question or two to readers of this blog:

What would it take to make this blog an even more valuable resource to you, the readers, over the next 30 days? What would it take to make the blog good enough that you would want to share it with at least one colleague on campus or in another college store?

The blog now has readers in almost every state (just missing Alaska) and over 45 countries representing every continent (except Antartica), with 200-300 regular readers every week. Clearly the ideas and information posted here have some value or interest given the number of repeat visitors, but as the Japanese are perhaps fond of saying, "Nothing is so good that it cannot be improved upon." So I ask, what would it take to make this blog better?

One idea I got from Innovate that I plan to try is that as I travel around I get to talk to lots of store managers and campus folks. Going forward, I will be trying to get short (2 minute) videos from people on what they are doing in their store that is innovative, or what they are doing related to digital content delivery, or perhaps other topics related to themes that have appeared on this blog. Ultimately, we would like to capture enough video clips that stores could use them as a resource of "good ideas" or "lessons learned" or even regarding "greatest challenges." If you would like to create your own 2-3 minute clip capturing an idea or something you did or learned that you would like to share with the college store community, pass along the link (although please keep it clean and constructive).

Thanks for reading-
-M

Requesting your Use Cases...

A number of the digital content projects NACS is involved with on behalf of college stores have reached a stage where we require greater input and involvement from stores. To streamline the process of gathering input, we will be adopting a format for developing "use cases" that can be employed with several different groups. In this instance, use cases are stories about how people successfully and/or unsuccessfully complete transactions for digital content (e-textbooks, digital course materials, print-on-demand, etc.) through college stores. We are looking for college store volunteers willing to help us develop a set of use cases (individually and/or collaboratively) that we can use in response to requests from projects like the CSU Digital Marketplace, OhioLink digital textbook prototype, IMS' e-Textbook taskforce, in addition to others. Contribution of use cases is a critical process to facilitate college store input into future digital initiatives.

Use cases are a common modeling technique in systems development in which we identify stories or scenarios that capture the sequence of events that occur when an individual (actor) attempts to complete a process (in this case, a digital transaction through a college store). A use case answers a question, for example, "How do I (as a student) purchase digital resources for my biology class through the college store?" There are a number of scenarios by which this could happen. The use case breaks this down into the multiple possible scenarios and eventually into individual actions or events, along with the interactions required to achieve the goal. For example, one use case might describe the process by which students purchase content via "hang tags" with access codes. Another use case might describe a similar scenario where access codes are generated at the point of sale, either at the in-store register or online. Yet another use case might describe how students could purchase content using in-store print-on-demand technology. Other possible use cases might describe scenarios by which college stores could broker transactions for content provided through campus course management systems (e.g., Blackboard, WebCT, Sakai, Desire2Learn, Angel, etc.)

This is an opportunity for college stores to participate in defining and designing how we would like to see the transactions take place within our stores for digital content. We need individuals with store-level expertise and ideas about how college stores might be involved with such transactions to assist with developing these use cases. Most use cases are only a couple pages in length and at this stage they do not need to be completely detailed. The outcomes from this process will be used to help communicate to other stakeholder groups how college stores see themselves being involved in future digital content transactions. If you are willing to help develop the use case scenarios, even just one, please send your ideas to Mark Nelson, NACS' Digital Content Strategist (mnelson@nacs.org). Questions about developing the scenarios, or ideas you have for a scenario (even if you do not have time for scenario development), are also very welcome.