Importance of consistency of experience

A recurring theme from all stakeholder groups was the recognition of the importance of consistency of experience for all stakeholders in the eText/IPM initiative, but especially faculty and students. This can be broken down into: consistency of inclusion and consistency of quality.

A major part of consistency, for students, is the inclusion of their program’s courses in the eText/IPM initiative. For some students, the majority of their required course materials are part of the IPM. This creates the expectation that no further course materials will need to be purchased. Confusion and frustration occurred when students had one or two courses outside of the IPM that required the purchase of additional course materials. This stemmed from a misunderstanding of the functioning of the IPM (i.e. that it functioned on a program level instead of a course level) but is an understandable reaction.

A major part of consistency, for faculty members, is the quality of course materials. For example, faculty members reported sporadic issues with resources being common towards the beginning of the initiative, with some of those issues gradually being resolved. These issues included images of insufficient resolution, as well as tables or figures in their resources not being displayed due to lack of intellectual property rights. Non-teaching staff and institutional leaders both formally and informally acknowledged the existence of issues like these, and new quality assurance processes have been put in place over the course of the eText/IPM initiative to reduce the incidence of these issues. Another point that faculty raised was that the type of resource being delivered varied widely, from essentially flat PDFs and epubs, to more engaging digital content.

Evidence, outputs, and outcomes

All stakeholder groups agreed to some degree on the need for more and better-quality evidence to support Algonquin College initiatives, especially ones as wide-ranging as eText/IPM. Both faculty and institutional leaders recognize the need for the evaluation of pilot projects. In the case of the eText/IPM initiative, other than a technical proof of concept, faculty and institutional leaders note that there was no robust evaluation of it, which they hold may have contributed to some of the issues over the life of the initiative. Faculty and institutional leaders note that clear outcomes of the initiative need to be defined and measured so that meaningful evaluation can occur. Processes for developing these outcomes and gathering evidence need to be transparent in their motivation and take into consideration the input of stakeholders from at least the four major college stakeholder groups, if not also platform/technology partners and publishers.