Skip to content


Why Study End Users? (Academic)

Here’s a study and article with some wisdom and insights in it:
Why study users? An environmental scan of use and users of digital resources in humanities and social sciences undergraduate education by Diane Harley in Frist Monday.
“ABSTRACT: This article presents an overview of a two-year study [1] that (1) mapped the universe of digital resources available to undergraduate educators in the humanities and social sciences (H/SS); and, (2) examined how a better understanding of the variation in use and users can benefit the integration of these resources into undergraduate teaching. Our results suggest that faculty use a vast array of online materials from both educational and “non-educational” sources, but many do not use digital resources for a host of reasons including the lack of direct relevance to their preferred pedagogical approaches, and insufficient time and classroom resources. Our discussions with digital resource providers confirmed that an understanding of the actual use of their resources in undergraduate settings is often murky. These discussions also made clear that resources created by higher education institutions will continue to proliferate despite a lack of formal knowledge about users and/or clear models for financial sustainability. A more precise understanding of the diversity of use and user behavior, and the ability to share findings from user studies, will require that the digital resource development community make typologies, standards of data and data collection, and results more transparent.”
Some Quotes:
“There is an implicit assumption that faculty at a variety of institutions import digital content to enhance their undergraduate teaching, but we simply do not know if such importation occurs on a measurable scale.”
“… we soon discovered that digital resources of all kinds are proliferating in many different environments and are created by many different kinds of developers.”
“Google-type searches were the most frequent way in which faculty found resources.”
“More than 70 percent of faculty said they maintain their own collections, although fewer of them (~35 percent) make their resources available to others on the Web.”
“Our research revealed that community building is important to digital resource providers …”
“… in-house evaluations can result in a “self-fulfilling prophecy” where studies frequently favor relationships and products that already exist.”
“We should not expect faculty, who we can assume know more about teaching their subject than non-specialists, to shoehorn their approaches into a technical developer’s ideas of what is valuable or the correct pedagogical approach.”
“The only way to understand the value of a digital resource — for individuals, communities, and institutions — is to measure its impact and its outcomes.”
“Future planning cannot ignore the new cohort of “always on” students that is poised to enter higher education institutions. We simply do not understand enough about these students …”
The full report, Understanding the Use of Digital Resources in Humanities and Social Science Undergraduate Education, is here.
There’s an interesting webliography too.
Stephen

0 Shares

Posted on: January 7, 2007, 7:54 pm Category: Uncategorized

0 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.