New Faculty Roles in Learning Outcomes Education: The Experiences of Four Models and Institutions

Innovative models that focus on learning outcomes engage faculty in new ways of facilitating and assessing learning, while their institutions seek to support and reward their participation. Innovators from four different institutions provide an overview of their approaches to implementing principles of outcomes-based education, compare their models, and explore the changes that are precipitated in the roles, rewards, resources, structures, and models. While the four institutions and models differ on several significant variables, the innovators identify common key elements and issues that the academy must address in order to transform the educational experience and culture to a more learning-centered enterprise.     

Comparison and Classification of Documents Based on Layout Similarity

This paper describes features and methods for document image comparison and classification at the spatial layout level. The methods are useful for visual similarity based document retrieval as well as fast algorithms for initial document type classification without OCR. A novel feature set called interval encoding is introduced to capture elements of spatial layout. This feature set encodes region layout information in fixed-length vectors by capturing structural characteristics of the image. These fixed-length vectors are then compared to each other through a Manhattan distance computation for fast page layout comparison. The paper describes experiments and results to rank-order a set of document pages in terms of their layout similarity to a test document. We also demonstrate the usefulness of the features derived from interval coding in a hidden Markov model based page layout classification system that is trainable and extendible. The methods described in the paper can be used in various document retrieval tasks including visual similarity based retrieval, categorization and information extraction.     

Migrating from ILLiad to Tipasa

Abstract

Tennessee State University was a decade long user of OCLC’s ILLiad platform. 2019 marked the year when the relationship with that system ended as our two interlibrary loan departments migrated to Tipasa, OCLC’s new cloud-based system. The platform change did not stem from dissatisfaction with ILLiad but from being informed that Tipasa would eventually replace ILLiad. This article covers three areas of the implementation: communication, staff training, and outreach. Explained is the communication had between library staff and OCLC representatives, what our participation in online cohort training involved, and included are visuals used to inform our campus about Tipasa.     

Media effectiveness, essentiality, and amount of study: a mathematical model

An in‐depth investigation of the relationship between media effectiveness, essentiality, and amount of study was presented. Overall, effectiveness explains 48% of the variation in the amount of study. Students who found the media more effective studied the media more. Those media that were more effective were studied more. The relationship between effectiveness and amount of study is different for each medium. This is because media differ in their degree of ‘essentiality‐versus‐optionality’. Thus, the amount of study depends on a combination of effectiveness and essentiality. The relationship between effectiveness, essentiality, and amount of study is different for each student. This is because students differ in their ‘sensitivities’—their sensitivity to effectiveness and to essentiality. The final equation used effectiveness, essentiality, and sensitivity to explain 74% of the variation in the amount of study. The analysis was informed by a mathematical model.