How do students really prefer to communicate? Part 2: VLE, Lecture Capture, and Social Media

By Ned Potter, Academic Liaison Librarian 

This is the second half of a two part post on how students like to hear from the central University. It's based on an audit conducted centrally at York, the results of which the Internal Communications Manager has kindly allowed me to share here. I'd recommend having a read of Part 1, focused on email as there's a lot of useful insights there.

This part will focus on the VLE, the popularity of lecture capture, use of social media and the University webpages. As with Part 1, I'll be using phrases like 'students prefer...' but of course the proviso is that I actually mean 'students at York prefer...' (and even more specifically, students who are prepared to sign up for a series of focus groups on internal comms in the first place). 

The surprising popularity of the VLE and the unsurprisingly popularity of Lecture Capture 

I must admit I was a little surprised to read that Blackboard was popular with the students. In actual fact they say it is difficult to navigate, but once mastered and if used well by their tutors, they are generally very positive about the VLE.

In particular the students liked the discussion forums where the lecturer takes the time to get involved. The opportunity to ask questions and clarify parts of the lecture they didn't understand is very much appreciated, and they highlighted the public availability of all the questions and answers - as opposed to a private conversation between student and lecturer which is seen as less fair and transparent.

The other things noted as positives were the email notifications when new content is added, and the posting of lecture materials and supporting information.

The most popular part of the VLE, however, was Replay, the lecture capture system that allows students to re-watch lectures (or catch-up if they were ill - lecture capture has been shown time and time again not to negatively impact on attendance, so it's not used as a way to avoid having to actually go to lectures...). To quote the report:

"At degree level they find it difficult to take in the level of detail and complexity in one sitting and so the opportunity to re-visit the lecture to listen and learn again, to take better notes and to revise is something they really, really value"

It is particularly valuable in conjunction with the discussion forums mentioned above, and reduces the need to seek out the tutor for extra guidance.

Not all students in the focus groups are on courses which use lecture capture extensively - when those that weren't heard from those that are, they made it clear they'd very much like this facility on their modules too.

You can read more about Replay on the E-Learning Development Team blog.

Students, social media and the University 

As mentioned in Part 1, the students would expect anything essential to be communicated by email. Social media can be used as well, but shouldn't ever be used exclusively for key info such as timetable changes and so on.

They're happy for Facebook to be used for 'fun stuff' but not serious stuff - they use it more than any other medium between themselves, but there's a mixed reaction to the University joining in. WhatsApp, Messenger and Snapchat are used a lot for peer-to-peer communication, and they really don't associate this kind of platform with the University and its communication channels at the moment. YikYak is known primarily as a place for cruelty and harm - students don't tend to use it unless there is a particular scandal they want to hear the gossip about.

Interestingly to me, Twitter is was reported as not being used abundantly and is considered as a tool for 'old people'. The main downside noted was about control, or the lack of control, over who sees what. At the Library we actually find Twitter to have quite high levels of engagement, the most of any social media platform we use, and the comms audit contradicting this chimes with other anecdotal evidence I've heard online of students being reluctant to really admitting they use Twitter but nevertheless using it anyway. It's also a lesson in trusting the stats, but interrogating the stats to make sure the engagement is actually coming from your users rather than your peers (and in our case, it is our actual users who interact with us and benefit from our Twitter account, predominantly).

Webpages and Google 

Students prefer to use Google to find information, even if it's info they know exists on the University website. I do this too - I Google my query plus the word 'York' even for stuff on the library website because it's quicker and more reliable. The students don't always trust the University's search function... They also don't expect news via the website - they feel they'll get any updates they need via email and social media. 

Perhaps the most interesting theme for me which came up in this section was one of relevance - students feel a lot of University comms are aimed at potential students, rather than at them, the current incumbents. There's an opportunity here for libraries: we are predominantly focused on existing users, and we can pull in other content for an internal audience, for example via Twitter, and share this with the students too.

How do students really prefer to communicate, and what should we do about it? Part 1: Email

By Ned Potter, Academic Liaison Librarian 

Tweet 

At the University of York there are audits every few years around student communication. They're conducted centrally by the University, rather than being library-specific. The most recent one was shared with the Library Marketing and Comms Group by York's Internal Communications Manager, and she's kindly given me permission to share the findings here because I think they're absolutely fascinating. They challenge some conventional wisdom, and reveal a lot.

There was a lot about email so this post is devoted to that area; there'll be a part 2 later in the week which covers social media, lecture capture, the VLE and other types of comms.

It's important to note the information was gleaned through focus groups rather than surveys in order to properly capture nuance, so it's not a giant sample size (under 100 people) and inevitably the views reflected will be representative of students engaged enough to turn up for a focus group... But personally I find the findings more useful than generic articles in the Higher Ed press about students of today.

Throughout this article I'll be using phrases like "Students prefer to do X" - the obvious caveat is that I mean "Students at York do X" but I'm not going to write that every time...

How do students communicate? The main findings around email 

1) Email remains the primary and preferred channel of communication with the University

I like this one because it confirms something I've thought for a while - that email is NOT dead. It gets a bad press and it's definitely far less cool than social media, but it still has a function. It's not that students especially love email, it's that they want US - the University and its key services - to communicate key info this way. 

2) Email mainly gets checked on phones, and this happens very frequently

Students check email primarily on their phones, sometimes moving on to a PC / laptop later (see point 3 below). 

Students check their phones for emails first thing when they wake up, last thing at night, and several times in between - many students have 'new message' alerts set up to go to their lock-screens, and will check new emails as they come in even whilst doing other things such as attending lectures.

3) Students triage messages according to 5 criteria 

Students make quick decisions on whether an email gets read there and then, binned, or deferred. They consider (in order of importance):

Relevance - title, sender, and the opening part of the message visible on their phone before they press to open the message; 

Familiarity - do they know and trust the person sending the email? Trusted senders include tutors, supervisors, departmental administrators, the Library, Careers Service, and Timetabling; 

Urgency - does it relate to something important that day or a pending deadline; 

Action - do they need to do something?  (Notice this is 4th on the list of importance...) Interestingly if they do need to do something they'll star the email and find a PC or laptop to log onto and action the email;

Time - if it looks like it can be dealt with quickly they'll read it right away and then delete, file or just mark as read. 

4) The high volume of email they receive is okay, on one condition... it MUST be targeted

Students get a huge volume of emails but they don't mind this as long as the emails are targeted. They object to irrelevant emails and perhaps more so to emails that appear to be relevant but turn out not to be - one example given was an invitation to an employers' event for the wrong subject area or year / status. The sender of that email lost the trust of the students and future emails were deleted upon arrival, unread. 

Any sense of emails happening automatically or without proper thought as to their relevance was met with dissatisfaction. A particular type of email came at the same time each day, suggesting it was automated - this too became one to delete automatically. 

Newsletters and digest emails were read, but often only the first part (too much scrolling and the email was abandoned) and these are the first to go - to be deleted unread - when there's a day with an overly high volume of emails. 

What can libraries change about the way we email students? 

The first thing is don't give up on email. Students expect communication from us to be via this medium, and it was strongly expressed that important information should come this way - key info can be shared via social media but must ALSO be shared via email because it's the one channel everyone checks. The reports of email's death have been greatly exaggerated. 

The second thing is, small details - like titles - really matter. The Library appears to be on the list of trusted senders, but in order to get read you need a decent subject line. (This didn't come up in the audit but I'd argue time of day is important too - if students get a truck load of emails between 9am and 10am, it may be better to join a shorter queue for their attention later in the day at 11am.) Also, because students primarily read email on their phone, you need a very strong opening line. Open your email client on your phone right now - how much can you read without opening a specific email? The way my phone is set-up I get to see about 40 words. So your first few words need to go straight to the heart of the matter - no long intros.

This is obvious, right? We all check emails ourselves on mobiles, we know what it's like. But how many times do we craft emails specifically with the receiver on their phone in mind? I can't speak for anyone else but in my case the answer is: not nearly often enough. 

Thirdly, segment your audience and target them with relevant emails - never include a group in a mass email unless they are directly relevant and would benefit from the info. If an email isn't essential to anyone, does it even need to be sent at all? There are too many emails that are sent out not just to the relevant people but to a smattering of less relevant people too. Every time we do that we diminish our value as communicators - our currency - and get closer to joining the dreaded auto-delete list. 

And related to that, reduce automation because it suggests we're not trying hard enough to avoid wasting their time. It's very hard to think carefully whether or not to send an email if it's automated. I've always said we shouldn't send newsletters out at the same time each week or month - it should be because we have a critical mass of useful things to tell our audience, not because 'it's the time we send out the newsletter'. So anything automated should at least be reviewed to make sure it's still serving a worthwhile purpose and not alienating our users. 

In Part 2 of this post we'll look at the (surprising?) popularity of the VLE, the love-affair with lecture capture, and where social media fits in with formal communication. 

Building a new university press

By Michael Fake & Tom Grady, White Rose University Press


White Rose University Press (WRUP) is an open access digital university press, run jointly by the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York. It was launched in January 2016 as one of only a handful of new university presses, and the only jointly-run academic press, in the UK. WRUP is first and foremost, an open access digital publisher, intended to support the production of high quality academic works, including books, journals and textbooks - and to make them free to read online. As of today the Press has had a stream of exciting, high-quality submissions, and we’re looking forward to the launch of our first books and journals at the start of 2017.

In this post I want to consider how the Press came about, and why we’ve adopted the approach that we have.

White Rose Libraries

The Press was set up and is operated by the libraries of the three partner institutions. These work together as the White Rose Libraries, collaborating on projects and services in order to achieve things that each library would struggle to do on their own. The partnership has a long history, dating back to the launch of their jointly-run institutional repositories (White Rose Research Online and White Rose Etheses Online), and including early involvement in what is now the Copac Collection Management Tools project, as well as mutual support agreements, shared training activities, and various other regional initiatives designed to pool resources and share expertise.

The limitations of scholarly communication

In 2014 the partnership started investigating the idea of setting up a digital press, with the intention of publishing open access digital journals, monographs, textbooks, and other scholarly outputs. The initial driver for this was strategic. The libraries, of course, were very conscious of the limitations of many of the existing models of scholarly communication: high subscription charges for journals; high APCs for open access articles deposited in hybrid journals; high costs for books; and limited or cumbersome functionality in many commercial ebook platforms - all while commercial publishers put pressure on academics to hand over copyright and agree to restrictions in the dissemination of their work. At the same time the consortium was watching with interest some of the moves that HEFCE and other funders were making around open access publishing - the rules on open access to REF articles was due to come into effect in 2015, and HEFCE were also making noises about possible future requirements for open access monograph publishing, with the Crossick Report being seen as an important weathervane.

In this environment the White Rose libraries were looking to find ways to support alternative models that could enhance the broader open access agenda; that would help scholars publish academic material that was free to readers; and that could reach as wide an audience as possible - all while ensuring that academics kept control over the material they were producing. Developing an open access university press, focused on publishing high quality material free to a global audience, was a way of doing something very practical and concrete in this space, and in late 2014 this vision, perhaps for the first time, started to seem feasible due to developments in publishing technology and workflows.

Changes in digital publishing

Digital-first publishing now means that books can be produced without needing huge investment in paper stock and warehousing of expensive print runs. Online books can be distributed through a variety of discovery channels without building a complex distribution chain from scratch. Even where print production is still desired (and there is still plenty of evidence that print is the preferred medium for academic monographs) the growth of print-on-demand vendors means that a digital press can create ebooks, without needing to second-guess the print market, and without requiring an expensive up-front investment in stock they might never sell. At the same time platforms for managing the process of book and journal editorial workflows have become available as open source software (e.g OJS, OMP), significantly reducing the potential overheads in establishing and running a publishing operation.

Alongside these technical developments, in 2014/15 a new generation of publishing service suppliers were entering the market - most prominently Ubiquity Press - offering a package of production services to new presses, allowing institutions to set up a publishing operation much more quickly, with a full production infrastructure ready from the start. This offered the tempting prospect that we could launch a new press not just with editorial software, a logo, and optimism - but with a whole network of relationships with typesetters, graphic designers, copyeditors, and indexers already established, as well as publishing expertise to guide us through our faltering first steps.

The rise of the new university press

Leeds, Sheffield and York were not quite the first to take the leap into publishing: at the time that we were making the decision in 2015 there were a handful of other libraries/institutions that had moved into the same space: UCL Press is the most prominent example, but also Westminster University Press, Goldsmiths Press, and University of Cardiff Press - along with other experimental publishing initiatives like Knowledge Unlatched and the Open Library of Humanities, which were similarly trying to develop new (mostly open access) models for scholarly publishing. That surge of activity was encouraging, suggesting as it did that we would be joining the vanguard of a broader movement in the development of scholarly communication. Our own research, surveying academics within the White Rose institutions, confirmed that a press would be meeting a perceived desire - with a significant proportion of academics saying that they would prefer to publish through an institutional or consortial press over a commercial press.

Implementation and governance

From idea to implementation took a significant amount of work throughout 2015. In the first instance it meant persuading a lot of stakeholders in academic departments across the three universities: we wanted and needed buy-in from academics, so there was a lot of work in taking the business case to various academic committees and boards, alongside persuading key influencers. However we found there was a real chicken and egg problem. In order to persuade people that the idea was solid and could succeed we needed to point to scholars who had already signed up to publishing with us - but academics weren’t willing to sign up to such an unknown entity without clear institutional backing. In the end the institutions had to take a leap of faith, trusting in the evidence we’d seen of successful initiatives with other new university presses.

The model we adopted was to work with Ubiquity Press as our production partner. This allowed us to tap into an existing infrastructure at relatively low cost, and to prioritise our limited resources into the front-end operations of attracting and working with academic authors and editors. The financial model underpinning the Press is “gold” open access publishing - that is, we levy Article and Book Processing Charges to pay for production - supported by an initial waiver fund put forward by the libraries. Of course, because the Press is not driven by profit, and because we only charge for the services we provide, those APCs and BPCs are as low as we can make them - just £360 for an article, and c.£4 - £5k for a medium-sized monograph.

The final key component was governance - ensuring we had an engaged and committed editorial board willing to hold us to the rigorous academic standards we had set for the Press, and to oversee our quality control processes. We were incredibly lucky to recruit such a distinguished set of academics from across the partnership who have been working with the Press’s operational staff and libraries to ensure that WRUP remains an academic-led and academic-focused initiative. Chaired by Professor Wyn Morgan (PVC for Learning and Teaching at Sheffield), the editorial board is evidence of the serious engagement with the Press that we’ve seen from senior academics across the consortium.

The Press opened for submissions on 4th January and we've had a really inspiring level of interest from a range of scholars and academics. Our first journals and books have been commissioned and are in preparation, and we're looking forward to launching our first publications at the start of 2017!