Ithaka S+R is developing business plans for two NSDL pathways projects - Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) Pathway and Science and Math Informal Learning Educators (SMILE) Pathway. The project is working to ensure that these two pathways have detailed, carefully-researched sustainability plans for their post-grant periods. Notable features of the project are a work plan that involves deep interaction as the plan is developed between the Ithaka S+R group and the two pathway projects, an evaluation plan that builds measureable sustainability goals, and recommendations that are specifically tailored to the needs and situations of the two pathways projects. Plans and practices developed over the course of this project are being shared with all Pathway projects to inform these additional projects' sustainability efforts.
The National Science Digital Library has a number of unique sustainability challenges. Its collection of resources is unusually broad in scope and depth, and that raises important questions about how best to reach users and meet their needs in a crowded landscape of other educational resources. The NSDL's decentralized model, in which project teams are spread among many institutions, and in which pieces of the technology infrastructure live either at partner universities or at NSF-funded central sites, is a particular challenge. Our project had two parts. One was to work with two NSDL projects to develop sustainability plans that they could implement. The second was to create public documents capturing lessons from this work that might be useful to the broader set of NSDL (and other digital academic resource) initiatives in their own sustainability planning. Our success with the first part of this project was mixed. With the decision to terminate funding for NSDL, CLEAN and SMILE both had fewer resources available to implement a sustainability plan than anticipated, possibly reducing the usefulness of our recommendations. In the case of SMILE, which was already in a no-cost extension, we attempted to provide as much value as possible under these circumstances by focusing our efforts on immediate and high priority issues as directed by the SMILE PIs. We provided recommendations on their mobile strategy and on opportunities to seek corporate foundation funding. We also conducted some primary research to better understand potential audience segments that SMILE could serve and that might broaden its appeal to potential funders. We do not know whether SMILE implemented any of these recommendations. CLEAN was in the middle of its grant period, and thus we hope that our research and recommendations were useful to its deliberations about ongoing service development and seeking new funding opportunities. Our recommendations to CLEAN were largely focused on how the service could more effectively address the needs of target users by, for example, making the website more appealing to teachers and discoverable by search engines. We strongly supported their efforts to form a partnership with NOAA as a means of gaining more visibility for the CLEAN collection, in addition to a new revenue stream. We presented our methodology and preliminary findings to the CLEAN team during one of its weekly meetings and then shared our final report with the entire group. Feedback from team members indicated that some found our work very valuable and supported our findings and recommendations. With both CLEAN and SMILE we observed some common challenges, which may be instructive in thinking about prospects for other NSDL projects: Digital projects compete for users on the open Web in a crowded field of educational resources. Having the best "product" is not sufficient to ensure that a desired audience will make use of a resource. It is essential to understand what these people need, what is currently available, what they do now, and what would motivate them to change their current behavior. Project leaders would benefit from support in understanding best practices of Web-based marketing, such as how to make their sites discoverable through search engines, or how to promote an "app" in an iTunes or Android marketplace. Launching a successful service on the Web is extremely difficult under any scenario, given the many types of competition for user attention and rapidly changing landscape. Project leaders must constantly make choices, sometimes among competing mission priorities. It is critical that accountability and authority be concentrated with those who are most motivated and capable of leading such initiatives successfully. Collaborative structures, on the other hand, tend to distribute authority and accountability among multiple parties and can thus weaken decision-making. These must be designed with great care. As a number of NSDL observers have noted, it is challenging to pursue both research and implementation in the context of digital educational resources. For example, how should one decide whether to try out new delivery technologies? A research agenda might point towards experimentation for the sake of learning, while an implementation orientation would mean selecting technologies based on an assessment of user needs and behavior. Projects need to be clear about what they are trying to accomplish, and what tradeoffs might be required to achieve their goals. Ithaka S+R has created short tutorials on ways to address some of these challenges. These are publicly available via our website. They are also incorporated into training programs that Ithaka S+R has developed for JISC and others.
