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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the legal issues of simultaneous Internet transmission of broadcasting programs of the Open University of Japan (OUJ) and to take legal measures to promote the mutual utilization of open university courses in Japan, the UK, China and Korea.

The author examines the legal relationship regarding Internet simultaneous distribution of broadcast courses at the OUJ. The author then considers the legal relationship between the UK, China and South Korea regarding the simultaneous transmission of broadcast courses over the internet. Based on that consideration, this paper clarifies legal measures to promote its utilization.

Internet transmission of broadcasting courses will be webcasting. Arguably, it can be assumed to be streaming and on-demand, albeit controversial. Webcasting will be publicly transmitted, but there is only an on-demand provision for Internet transmission. As webcasting is streaming and on-demand, it involves reproduction of broadcasting courses. Therefore, webcasting needs to provide streaming provision for public transmission rights and associate them with reproduction right.

The originality of this paper lies in clarifying the legal response of the object, subject and rights of webcasting from the perspective of the OUJ, in order to dispel legal problems that may arise in the future against this unexplored phenomenon. Additionally, this paper is valuable in that it presents legal consistency from the point of view of the comparative laws of Japan, the UK, China and South Korea, based on an examination of the legal response in Japan.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the less than purposeful shift in post‐secondary education models and the implications for the institution, faculty and students.

Analysis of the impact of technology for post‐secondary education futures.

Advances in virtual connectivity will deconstruct the traditional idea of a university while also challenging the economic models used by students in determining their future.

The increasing research and analysis of the ubiquity of knowledge once held within the university indicates that the disruption of post‐secondary education will force all parties to re‐assess the future of the post‐secondary institutions in a global knowledge society.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the online learning experience (LE) of massive open online courses (MOOCs) among the students in India using the lens of community of inquiry (CoI) model and two additional contextual factors.

The study conducted a survey using a structured questionnaire among the undergraduate and postgraduate students to examine the LE of MOOCs using the CoI framework and contextual variables – technical barrier (TB) and hedonic motivation (HD). The primary data were analyzed with the partial least squares structural equation modeling technique.

The results show that teaching presence (TP) influences cognitive presence (CP) and social presence (SP). SP influences CP. It is also found that TP, SP and CP influence the LE of MOOCs. It is found that TB negatively influences LE but is not significant and HD significantly influences LE positively for MOOCs.

This study has a few limitations as it is a cross-sectional study in India, which surveyed undergraduate and postgraduate MOOCs learners, and caution needs to be taken while generalizing the outcomes. Further studies can be conducted across other countries considering demographic factors like age, gender, income groups, education and profession.

This research highlights the antecedents influencing the LE of MOOC learners using the CoI framework which will help the MOOC designers and marketers to apprehend the factors influencing LE. The results of this research will help them formulate suitable strategies in the design and delivery of MOOCs to improve the LE of learners.

This unique research investigates and empirically validates the CoI framework to understand LE of MOOC learners in India. This research extends the CoI framework by adding contextual factors – TB and HD in the context of a developing country.

Whilst previous chapters have considered the nature and benefits of open education (OE) initiatives, a fundamental question remains as to the sustainability and viability of such practices over the medium to long term.

The existing literature suggests a considerable diversity of models of OE in organisational and funding terms, and there is the need to gain a better understanding of the distinctive pathways to sustainability that are linked to specific organising and funding logics.

However, this very diversity and the insufficiently developed notion of sustainability in this context hamper the efforts aimed at categorising and comparing different models, and this chapter considers these questions in more depth.

To this aim, we analyse and categorise the main funding arrangements by first identifying the key components of each distinctive OE system in the Section ‘System Elements’, whilst reflecting in parallel on the notion of sustainability.

In the Section ‘System Configurations’, we offer a detailed description and analysis of the most prominent funding models of OE to illustrate the diversity of funding arrangements and distinctive organisational logics underpinning them. We explore the logic of these business models by unpacking each distinctive form of organising around four key aspects: customer offer, value chain configuration, funding and profit formula, and strategic positioning.

In the Section ‘Sustainability’, we seek to refine our understanding of the concept of sustainability in the context of OE, giving due consideration to non-economic definitions of this concept and to some of the core objectives attached to OE. We suggest that sustainability can be ultimately apprehended and defined through a number of key variables.

The section ‘Open Education: Motives and Implications’ examines the motives behind the OE movement, its wide-ranging implications, and considers how OE fits in with the trends in the higher education (HE) sector as a whole. We discuss the future for this radical innovation, emphasising the central role of communities of practice and the need for institutional support. We argue that the development of sustainable communities is the fundamental basis of any OE model and that reflexivity is required in order to ensure the sustainability of this innovative practice. Similarly, the systematic development of collaborative practices and networks between the main actors at community, institutional and national levels is considered key to the development and embedding of OE initiatives within the overall educational sector.

The concluding section brings together the various strands of our argument on the nature and characteristics of the various OE business models, their sustainability and the way forward.

This paper draws on the extant literature and experiences of selected ACBF‐supported programs to interrogate approaches to enhancing institutional leadership in African universities. The paper posits that African universities must proactively take charge of fostering institutional leadership so as to translate leadership competence into strategic assets. Such assets are key to bolstering intellectual capital, strategic scanning, i.e. the capacity to recognize the behaviour of interconnected systems to make effective decisions under varying strategic and risk scenarios, and the transformation of knowledge. To this end, African universities need to transcend their current “modern” system of education to a post‐modern perspective, which recognizes context, collaboration and knowledge as valued skills. Enhancing institutional leadership is also crucial if Africa is to compete in today’s rapidly globalizing world and knowledge society. More importantly, doing so has direct impact on shaping the quality of leadership on the Continent, and consequently the resulting policy decisions and governance. The paper concludes that while institutional, political, demographic as well as resource challenges exist, African universities today, are uniquely positioned as a result of uptake of knowledge management, strengthened private‐public partnerships and advances in ICT to enhance institutional leadership.

This paper aims to explore the technology‐driven horizon for education in general and post secondary education in particular.

The paper looks at technology in education.

Rapid changes in information technologies will profoundly change the traditional educational institutions for students, faculty and administration. The system that has stood for basically four centuries, like the dinosaurs at the K‐T catastrophe, will not suffer immediate collapse, but will profoundly change as content, due to the rise of the internet becomes, essentially free.

Educational systems are not immune to the laws of change. Information technologies are sufficiently strong forces that incremental evolution is not an option. This editorial calls for the system to take a serious look at itself and, while the current residents of the system may survive, the institution, itself, must look beyond the present.

This paper aims to discuss the present status of using new generation web technology, social media and Web 2.0 features among the technological university library websites in south India. It seeks to assess the library websites as a primary platform and one‐stop portal for information services and to examine how much library websites are effective in providing web‐based information services.

The library websites of the technological universities in south India were evaluated on the basis of a relative weight checklist. The criteria for the checklist were drawn on the basis of availability of websites for library, resource discovery tools, access to scholarly content and Web 2.0 tools. The various issues and challenges in adapting new web technologies in the academic environment are discussed.

Using the current web development technologies and deploying for mainstream web information services is not widespread as web information services are yet to take off widely in academic libraries. The majority of university libraries are found to be working in the conventional library settings and the diffusion rate of web information services is relatively low.

As this is an assessment of the existing online information infrastructure facilities of the engineering universities in south India, the awareness of web‐based information services, their viability, and service values can be enhanced. More emphasis to improve upon the current learning, online educational facilities and benchmarking electronic information services for sustainability is highlighted.

The purpose of this paper is as follows: this is a short excursion into the changing world of post‐secondary education through a review of two books: Reinventing Higher Education: The Promise of Innovation, by Ben Wildavsky, Andrew P Kelly and Kevin Carey; and DIY U, by Aya Kamenetz.

The paper presents reviews of two recently published books.

The economics and functions of post secondary education at the baccalaureate and post‐baccalaureate (research) levels are changing in a world where knowledge flows freely across geo‐political boundaries. The Ivory Tower no longer commands from a fixed location or as the center of knowledge, both the historic and the new.

Individuals as well as public and private sector entities have multiple sources for knowledge and new abilities of sharing and obtaining knowledge. “The Academy” as created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an independent home for scholarly endeavors has changed as new demands are placed upon the institutions and the faculty.

The purpose of this one‐year longitudinal study is to examine the usage and production of educational videos on YouTubeEDU, an open, video‐sharing, educational area of YouTube established in 2009 and used primarily by institutions of higher education. The aim of the YouTubeEDU project is to provide free global access to higher education videos. Analysis from a library science perspective is valuable to further development of YouTubeEDU.

From August 2010 to July 2011, the top 50 video clips were recorded monthly. YouTubeEDU loosely arranged clips according to the number of site visits and classified them into 13 disciplines: business, education, engineering, fine arts and design, health and medicine, history, humanities, journalism and media, law, literature, mathematics, science, and social science. Analysis of subject area and content correspondence was conducted using YouTubeEDU‐assigned, creator‐defined, and study‐specific attributes.

The majority of top videos per month were university public relations materials. Overall, 40 percent of the videos were academically‐oriented; English is the predominant language. Even some videos contributed by non‐English‐speaking higher education institutions were in English. The researchers also discovered misclassification of videos in several disciplines.

Based on the researchers' monthly observations, future collaboration with the YouTubeEDU project is needed to collect comprehensive data regarding worldwide visitor traffic and higher education video contributions.

Many areas needed improvement in the YouTubeEDU project; the proposed changes would ensure that the quality and utility of videos meet the standards of higher education institutions while embracing the needs of global learners.

The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of advent of electronic information resources on “academic and carrier related core aspects of user performance”.

Seven sampled agricultural universities across northern India were surveyed personally by the investigator for collecting data about the questions under investigation through a structured questionnaire. The response of the users for each statement under investigation was collected with simple “Yes”/“No” option. The investigator also resorted to the telephonic and e-mail communication to collect prompt response and had a personal interaction with respondents to substantiate the collected responses and remove any ambiguity thereof.

It is found that the majority of respondents are of the opinion that due to advent of e-resources the users’ interest in studies has enhanced (62.90 per cent) and that the e-resources have played a significant role in timely completion/submission of their study related assignments (74.30 per cent). It is also evident that a good proportion of respondents agree that the advent of e-resources has laid a positive impact on performance of users in “academic examinations” (50.80 per cent), “competitive examinations” (52.80 per cent), and the “interviews” (46.18 per cent) they face. Statistically, it is also verified that the performance of users with respect to five aspects investigated in this study is significantly associated with advent of e-resources (p < 0.01), whereas it does not show any association with one aspect i.e. “timely completion of an academic degree”.

The findings are based on mere opinion of users and need to be verified by devising a well-articulated methodology for verification of the user performance related facts both in print and electronic eras, independent of the users’ opinion.

The findings of this study shall prompt the budget allocating authorities of the libraries to reformulate their fund allocation policies. Findings of this study shall act as logical basis to enhance budget for improving the volume of e-resources. These also emphasize the fact that a provision of recurring fund needs to be created for facilitating single window based anytime anywhere access to the available e-information base, which may include annual subscription charges for availing (i) proxy software services for remote access and (ii) federated search engine for single window searching.

This is first work of its nature in northern Indian agricultural libraries. The findings will be useful for the authorities to decide about the degree of importance the libraries need to endorse with the procurement of information resources in electronic form. The study will really inspire the researchers and librarians to conduct similar studies in other specific domains of knowledge and come out with significant findings and suggestions.