Published in March 2007 by the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board, A Tale of Two Cities is a report portraying Philadelphia's human capital challenge as latent economic opportunity. The research highlights the economic potential that investing in the education of Philadelphia's people can yield, both for the individual and the community as a whole. The publication is intentionally designed to be readable and accessible to all Philadelphia citizens -- thought leaders, community members, public officials, and business owners. In everyday language, it identifies the connection between the undereducation of the city's workforce and Philadelphia's economic problems, high levels of unemployment and poverty, social dislocation, tax challenges, and safety concerns; concerns that all Philadelphians understand and have a stake in addressing.

Published in March 2007 by the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board, A Tale of Two Cities is a report portraying Philadelphia's human capital challenge as latent economic opportunity. The research highlights the economic potential that investing in the education of Philadelphia's people can yield, both for the individual and the community as a whole. The publication is intentionally designed to be readable and accessible to all Philadelphia citizens -- thought leaders, community members, public officials, and business owners. In everyday language, it identifies the connection between the undereducation of the city's workforce and Philadelphia's economic problems, high levels of unemployment and poverty, social dislocation, tax challenges, and safety concerns; concerns that all Philadelphians understand and have a stake in addressing.

As the large lecture course continues to be a component of many college programs, the potential of online technology to enhance such courses remains a question for researchers. To what extent can such technology result in saving financial resources and teaching time? How do students attending lectures respond to online course components? Does such technology have a noticeable impact on student performance and remote learning? In a study conducted at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, authors Diane Harley, Jonathan Henke, and Michael W. Maher compared traditional and technology-enhanced versions, including video lectures streamed over the internet, of an undergraduate chemistry course over a two-year span. In their findings, the authors indicate significant potential savings of money and teaching time after the second year as well as positive student attitudes towards the technology. Although the technology-enhanced version of the course did not result in any noticeable differences in student performance, the authors conclude that the benefits of online technology for large lectures remain substantial, particularly in providing stressed students with flexibility in their use of time and space, including viewing lectures remotely while preparing for exams. With respect to fully realizing significant institutional cost-savings, however, more faculty members would need to share and reuse course materials than is currently the case.

Almost every American research university and library has made significant investments in digitizing its intellectual and cultural resources and making them publicly available. There is, however, little empirical data about how these resources are actually used or who is using them (Harley, 2007). Those who fund and develop digital resources have identified the general lack of knowledge about the level and quality of their use in educational settings as pressing concerns. As part of a larger investigation into use and users of digital resources (Harley et al., 2006), 1 we conducted an experimental analysis of two commonly-used methods for exploring the use of university-based Web-based resources: transaction log analysis (TLA) and online site surveys. In this article, we first provide an overview of these two methods, including their key challenges and limitations. We then describe an implementation of TLA and online surveys in combination on two local sites and the results of that test, including an exploration of the surveys' response rates and bias. From that test, we draw conclusions about the utility of these two methods and the particular analytic methods that may provide the most valuable and efficient results.

The universe of postsecondary education is expanding. It is an era of rapid demographic and labor market changes, increased competition and shifts in institutional form (e.g., the rise of for profit degree granters, the hybrid form of nonprofit/for profit partnerships, corporate universities), and new forms of delivery driven by emerging technologies. In nearly all of these cases, the pace of innovation and establishment of new institutional forms outstrips the ability of regulators or policy makers to stay ahead of the curve.

To better understand the complex interplay of public policy drivers regulating e-learning, the Center for Studies in Higher Education convened a meeting of experts in February 2006 for a preliminary examination of existing and emerging public policies that will shape its regulation both domestically and internationally. Three white papers were used as a point of departure for the discussions, which focused on the following areas: The Changing Regulatory Environment: Who, What, Why, and Where?; Finance, Investment, and the Flow of Capital; Student Access and Equity; Social Costs and Benefits from an International Perspective; and Consumer Protection and Cross-border Education. This report summarizes our conversations and recommendations for future research.

This Educause Quarterly article draws on an in-depth study of humanities and social science (H/SS) faculty and their attitudes about use and nonuse of digital resources in teaching undergraduates. It explores in some detail faculty attitudes about digital resources use in teaching environments. It also summarizes the larger research we conducted on the universe of digital resources available to undergraduate educators in a subset of users in H/SS and suggests how understanding use, users, and nonusers might benefit the integration of these resources into scholarly environments.

This report presents five thickly-described interdisciplinary case studies that explore academic value systems as they influence publishing behavior and attitudes of University of California, Berkeley faculty. The case studies are based on direct interviews with relevant stakeholders -- faculty, advancement reviewers, librarians, and editors -- in five fields: chemical engineering, anthropology, law and economics, English-language literature, and biostatistics. The results of the study strongly confirm the vital role of peer review in faculty attitudes and actual publishing behavior. There is much more experimentation, however, with regard to means of in-progress communication, where single means of publication and communication are not fixed so deeply in values and tradition as they are for final, archival publication. We conclude that approaches that try to "move" faculty and deeply embedded value systems directly toward new forms of archival, "final" publication are destined largely to failure in the short-term. From our perspective, a more promising route is to (1) examine the needs of scholarly researchers for both final and in-progress communications, and (2) determine how those needs are likely to influence future scenarios in a range of disciplinary areas.

The Center for Studies in Higher Education, with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is conducting research to understand the needs and desires of faculty for inprogress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. In the interest of developing a deeper understanding of how and why scholars do what they do to advance their fields, as well as their careers, our approach focuses in fine-grained analyses of faculty values and behaviors throughout the scholarly communication lifecycle, including sharing, collaborating, publishing, and engaging with the public. Well into our second year, we have posted a draft interim report describing some of our early results and impressions ased on the responses of more than 150 interviewees in the fields of astrophysics, archaeology, biology, economics, history, music, and political science.

Our work to date has confirmed the important impact of disciplinary culture and tradition on many scholarly communication habits. These traditions may override the perceived "opportunities" afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category. As we have listened to our diverse informants, as well as followed closely the prognostications about the likely future of scholarly communication, we note that it is absolutely imperative to be precise about terms. That includes being clear about what is meant by "open access" publishing (i.e., using preprint or postprint servers for scholarship published in prestigious outlets versus publishing in new, untested open access journals, or the more casual individual posting of working papers, blogs, and other non-peer-reviewed work). Our research suggests that enthusiasm for technology development and adoption should not be conflated with the hard reality of tenure and promotion requirements (including the needs and goals of final archival publication) in highly competitive professional environments.