JISC

Evaluation and support study

Summary

JISC wishes to commission an evaluation and support study to work with the JISC and US National Science Foundation (NSF) joint Digital Libraries in the Classroom programme. The work will help to devise metrics to measure key impacts, will support the four UK and US projects to help develop and share evaluation methodologies, and will synthesise key achievements and lessons learned from the projects.   

Funding of up to £70,000 (including VAT, travel and expenses) is available for this work. It is anticipated that two trips to the US will be required during the lifetime of the evaluation support study. The work should commence by Monday 4 April 2005. The final report should be produced by Friday 7 July 2006.

Background and overview

JISC is a committee of the UK further education (FE) and higher education (HE) funding bodies which supports colleges and universities in their use of the Internet and other Information and Communications Technology (ICT) applications.The JISC supports FE and HE institutions in exploiting the opportunities of ICT by exercising vision and encouraging collaboration and co-operation.  It does this by funding and managing national development programmes and services.  

Digital Libraries in the Classroom programme is part of the JISC Information Environment activity. The Information Environment (IE) underpins the building of an on-line environment that provides secure and convenient access to a comprehensive collection of educational and scholarly resources. The environment is based on the IE Information Architecture. The architecture supports discovery, access and publishing of resources. It is based on an open standards framework that allows interoperability across a range of resources and services. The IE supports learning, teaching and research activities. A wide range of projects have been funded as part of the IE.  The core programmes of activity are:

• Portals and Presentation
• Digital Libraries in the Classroom
• Shared Services and Middleware
• Service Provider Development
• Repositories
• Common Information Environment
• Digital Preservation.

The Digital Libraries in the Classroom programme is an international programme jointly funded by JISC and the National Science Foundation (NSF).  It has been developed to bring about significant improvements in the learning and teaching process in certain disciplines within higher education in the US and UK, through bringing emerging technologies and readily available digital content into mainstream educational use. Four projects have been funded under this programme as follows:

• The Spoken Word led by Glasgow Caledonian University and Michigan in partnership with the BBC exploring the use of digital audio in the humanities
• DialogPlus a partnership between the University of Southampton, the University of Leeds, Penn State and the University of California, Santa Barbara, working in the Geography discipline
• DIDET a partnership between the University of Strathclyde and Stanford University working in the design engineering discipline
• DART a partnership between the London School of Economics and Columbia University in the discipline of Anthropology