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This paper aims to report on the efforts made to enhance the engagement of IT students with non-IT-specific content. The mechanism to foster this engagement was the introduction of an eLearning information system (ELIS) for a finance-related subject within an IT undergraduate degree at the university. The subject developers were primarily concerned with both the learning design and the engagement of the student to enable the effective incorporation of an ELIS into the classroom.

This interpretive research used a comparative case study as the aim was to gain an in-depth understanding of a particular situation. The research approach also allows an open-minded interpretation of the collected data as the researcher is interested in looking for the “Why and not the How”. Data were collected via an online university student feedback survey.

Four key themes emerged from the data as follows: IT students learning non-IT-related content was a major driving force behind the changes to the course; staff change brought fresh eyes to the subject content and enabled improvements to occur; introducing the ELIS assisted the teaching staff to reduce preparation time while also helping students learn at the own pace; and collaborative group work helped facilitated student insights into real life work scenarios. The findings show that each of the key themes identified played a role in improving student engagement and satisfaction with the non-IT subject matter.

The value of this paper is from its practical perspective. Engaging IT students in non-IT subject matter is a challenging proposition for which there is no simple solution. This paper shows that over a five-semester period and through a phased implementation of major changes, student satisfaction and engagement with non-IT subject matter has improved steadily. This paper is of interest, and hence value, to academics who encounter problems or issues of engaging students in non-domain-related subject matter.

Policymakers have focused on improving STEM outcomes for US high school students for over 50 years. Much of this focus has centered on improving the quality of STEM teachers, particularly in poor and minority schools. Few, if any, of these efforts have considered the importance of the content knowledge of those providing instructional leadership in schools – namely, principals and assistant principals. This chapter examines the percentage of school leaders with teacher certification in mathematics or science and the degree to which teacher and school leader turnover interrupts the leadership–teacher relationships. The study concludes relatively few school leaders have the content knowledge to provide deep instructional leadership. Moreover, the study finds combined teacher and school leader turnover greatly diminishes the sustained relationships between instructional leaders and teachers, particularly in lower-performing schools.

To share the experiences and challenges faced by the Open University Library (OUL) in developing a content management (CM) system for its subject guides.

A summary of multi‐format subject guide production at the OUL is provided to justify the decision to develop a new system for their production using a commercial CM system. A detailed consideration of the design and implementation stages is given before a critical review of the project outcome.

Highlights the complex design and implementation aspects to the project, in part due to the nature of subject guide content itself, and examines the reasons for the CM system delivered not being adopted. Emphasises the importance of CM to future OU applications.

Of interest not only to other academic libraries but to any organisation seeking to organise and publish original material for different audiences in a variety of formats from a single data source.

This paper is the first to document a systematic approach to library subject guide production using a CM system and the associated information management challenges and realities of multi‐format publishing in an academic publishing context.

From 2007 to 2009, Kansas State University Libraries (K-State Libraries) committed to strategically assess and redevelop their organizational structure. The Libraries’ Strategic Plan and position redistributions commenced in 2007 and 2009 respectively, with adjustments in 2010 to accommodate the university’s K-State 2025 Strategic Plan. Together, these changed the roles of former subject librarians, dividing and transferring responsibilities for outreach, reference, instruction, and collection development. Among the more significant changes was the creation of departments devoted to patron groups, rather than specific academic disciplines. Illustrating how the reorganization changed the roles of traditional library services, this chapter outlines the responsibilities of three librarian positions: Undergraduate and Community Services, Faculty and Graduate Services, and Content (collection) Development. The librarians are also founding members of the K-State Libraries Arts Matrix, an ad hoc team operating within the new organization to enhance communication and expand subject expertise in the visual and performing arts. These transitions presented both opportunities for engagement and specialization, as well as challenges to communication and subject identity. These issues are addressed, including solutions offered by the matrix model. Although this study is limited by the neoteric existence of this model, and lack of precedents for comparison, K-State Libraries’ example may offer a viable model for institutions adapting to fiscal realities. Additionally, matrices may supplement the traditional subject librarian model for those seeking to enhance engagement and collaboration. This chapter offers further insight into a strategic planning process, as well as a transparent, inclusive strategy for librarians adjusting to organizational change.

The purpose of the paper is to conduct an exploratory study that proposes a personalized knowledge integration platform for digital libraries which can provide users with personalized information and knowledge services.

A prototype system (PIKIP_DL) is designed and developed with two types of service, i.e. personalized information/knowledge service and personalized subject category service. Evaluation of the PIKIP_DL by domain specialists and software experts is conducted. Comments are implications are addressed.

The main findings include the following: the proposed system can help suggest materials that readers are interested in for DL; the proposed system can help construct knowledge contents in a hierarchical structure; and a common recommendation concerning knowledge structure from the reviewers is that the proposed system should add a self‐organizing knowledge map function that would allow users to view knowledge subjects in a graphic manner.

The results from the evaluation of reviewers revealed that the proposed PIKIP_DL is acceptable to the integration of both personalized information service and personalized knowledge subject service. This implies that librarians and DL software agents should place emphasis on integrated service development to attract the attention of their users. Towards this goal, they could explain that personalized services (e.g. material recommendation, message recommendation, knowledge subject materials) with a mechanism of multi‐resource integration can help provide DL resources according to users' needs and wants, and in consequence to enhance DL service efficacy.

The research describes the importance of information/knowledge integration with respect to its support on the learning and study methods of users, and has developed a personalized knowledge integration platform as a mechanism that provides a personalized information service and a personalized knowledge subject category service. By employing Apriori algorithm and association rules as the data mining mechanism, personalized information recommendations are derived from circulation data, and a knowledge subject category is integrated from online sharing knowledge by participants.

The achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) for all communities and jurisdictions require a comprehensive roadmap that encompasses all dimensions of data infrastructure, social, economic, environmental and governance ecosystems. With this in mind, this paper aims to establish the link between the curriculum and intended learning outcomes of undergraduate and postgraduate subjects offered by the University and sustainability. This study is a part of a wider university strategy to embed sustainability knowledge and values in the university curricula. The 17 SDGs developed as a part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainability Development was used as tool to measure and map how the subjects are linked with sustainability.

To incorporate sustainability into the curriculum, this paper developed an interdisciplinary approach for analysing the interconnection between the SDGs, the expected subject learning points and the relevant aspects of sustainability (geospatial information, the legal, policies and institutional components). As part of the approach, in the first phase of the study, qualitative data were collected through a review of published information on the SDGs and the content of the subjects available in the subject handbook. Subject codes were assigned to the keywords and key phrases extracted from the SDGs and the subject content, and then compared and matched to establish the link between the subjects and the SDGs. Six university schools offering over 2,157 subjects were investigated. In the second phase, a survey was conducted involving subject coordinators with the purpose of validating the findings of the first phase and determining the strength of the linkages between the subjects and the SDGs. In the third phase, a plugin was designed to be used in the digital twin platform developed in the UoM, allowing visualisation of the research outcomes.

Based on the interim findings, it was found that some subjects within the schools are linked to more than one SDG. However, not all of the subjects within the schools can be linked to the SDGs. There is a scope of improvement for embedding sustainability in more subjects within the schools. Some of the schools were also found to have weak linkages with sustainability, which demonstrate the challenge in technical subjects in linking their subject contents with sustainability.

This study provides a methodology which enables the integration of sustainability into current state of the curricula at the university to be established. Further, with the advancement of geospatial technology and new visualisation opportunities through the use of the digital twin platform provides capabilities to communicate the outcomes of sustainability and involvement of each faculties and departments more effectively to the university community and wider stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the content management solution for 50 subject guides maintained by librarian subject specialists at the University of Nevada, Reno Libraries.

The Web Development Librarian designed an SQL Server database to store subject guide content and wrote ASP.Net scripts to generate dynamic web pages. Subject specialists provided input throughout the process. Hands‐on workshops were held the summer before the new guides were launched.

The new method has successfully produced consistent but individually customized subject guides while greatly reducing maintenance time. Simple reports reveal the association between guides and licensed resources. Using the system to create course‐specific guides would be a useful follow‐up project. Skills learned in training workshops should be refreshed at regular intervals to boost confidence and introduce changes in the system.

The advantages of centralizing content and separating it from presentation cannot be overstated. More consistency and less maintenance is just the beginning. Once accomplished, a library can incorporate Web 2.0 features into the application by repurposing the data or modifying the ASP.Net template. The now‐organized data is clean and ready to migrate to web services or next‐generation research guides when the time is right.

This paper uniquely reports on an SQL Server, ASP.Net solution for managing subject guides. SQL Server includes data management features that increase application security and ASP.Net offers built‐in functionality for manipulating and presenting data. Utmost attention was given to creating simple user interfaces that enable subject specialists to create complex web pages without coding HTML.

Accordingly, this paper aims to perform a diagnosis on the inclusion of gender skills in all of its official degree programmes, for the purpose of drafting a best practices guide that may serve as motivation to include mainstreaming and specific skills in “teaching practice”.

This research analyses how European standards have been transferred to the teaching programmes of a Spanish university with more than 60,000 students, the University of Seville (US), the third largest in Spain. A content analysis of 4,643 undergraduate degree programmes has been carried out for all branches of knowledge.

The authors have established the scant presence of the gender perspective in the teaching projects of the US. Over 80% of them do not comply with the regulations in this regard. The second hypothesis, namely, that there are differences between fields of knowledge when complying with the mandatory transversal application of the gender perspective, has also been substantiated. This is especially the case in the natural sciences and engineering and architecture.

The results illustrate the little echo of the regulations in the teaching projects and the existence of important differences when it comes to the gender perspective according to the branches of knowledge. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research to carry out a study of this nature in all the degrees taught at a university and provide evidence of the need to modify equality policies in the university environment.

In this chapter, three educators recount experiences of professional development from different perspectives in order to examine the intersection of teacher knowledge and subject matter in the areas of science and mathematics education. Professional development projects are productive avenues for exploring this phenomenon. We share stories of experience from professional develop projects of teachers who were situated in different places on the professional knowledge landscape: one elementary school teacher, one teacher educator, and one mathematics educator. From these various vantage points, the relationship between mathematics and science content knowledge and teacher knowledge holds different complexities and complications. Issues related to balancing teacher knowledge with content knowledge in professional development emerge. Based on the stories of experience and the analysis of the narratives, deliberation of curriculum is seen to be a valuable concept when engaging in professional development with teachers. Further, Pragmatic Intellectual Space is proposed for productive approaches to professional development.

This paper surveys theoretical and practical issues associated with a particular type of information retrieval problem, namely that where the information need is pictorial. The paper is contextualised by the notion of a visually stimulated society, in which the ease of record creation and transmission in the visual medium is contrasted with the difficulty of gaining effective subject access to the world's stores of such records. The technological developments which, in casting the visual image in electronic form, have contributed so significantly to its availability are reviewed briefly, as a prelude to the main thrust of the paper. Concentrating on still and moving pictorial forms of the visual image, the paper dwells on issues related to the subject indexing of pictorial material and discusses four models of pictorial information retrieval corresponding with permutations of the verbal and visual modes for the representation of picture content and of information need.