Transcript: Building Bridges to Knowledge

A Conversation with Kiren Shoman, SAGE Publishing

For podcast release Wednesday 2 January 2019

KENNEALLY: Digital transformation isn’t a switch, of course. But as we all learning, it’s an evolutionary, incremental process, a journey that is shaped both by strategic goals and customer need and demand. It’s precisely customer demand that SAGE Publishing responded to when they developed and launched their SAGE video series. We’re going to learn about that today. In this discussion of the evolutionary nature in digital transformation, we’ll look at how technology plays a supporting role in this transfer of ideas from researchers and other content creators into the minds of students, users, readers – learners, I suppose we should call them all today. We’ll highlight the work of that video portfolio, but also look at a variety of ways that SAGE has addressed this very important challenge.

And with that, I want to welcome to the program our very special guest today, Kiren Shoman. Kiren is vice president, editorial, at SAGE Publishing. Kiren, welcome to our webinar.

SHOMAN: Thank you very much for having me, Chris.

KENNEALLY: Well, we are looking forward to this discussion with you. We can tell people a little bit more about your background. You are responsible for SAGE London’s pedagogical publishing, covering textbooks, reference, and video. You work closely with your colleagues around SAGE to explore new product innovations within both print and digital publishing, as well as content development within emerging digital streams. And as part of SAGE’s leadership, you’re actively involved in the diversity and inclusion agenda.

SAGE is a very special kind of publishing house, an independent publishing house, one founded with an important mission around research. And I’ll give you an opportunity to tell us a bit more about where SAGE came from and where you are today in 2018.

SHOMAN: Great, thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, so I quite like these two images, which show our founder, Sara Miller McCune, who founded SAGE back in 1965. And she had, I think, a few years of experience in publishing, but she really wanted to do something different that she felt she wasn’t seeing happening at the time around her in the places that she was, so she set up SAGE. And at the time that she did, her mission was the dissemination of usable knowledge. That was very much the sort of mantra, if you like, that she was working to. And over time, we’ve sort of continued to embrace that idea, but adding in as we’ve grown a sort of full recognition of the intrinsic value of education.

Sara’s always been highly committed to the social sciences, so that’s always been an area where we’ve really been strong in. And over time, we’ve come to start talking about our mission in a slightly new way, which I think has some relevance to this digital transformation story, where we talk of ourselves as building bridges to knowledge and recognizing that there’s been a lot of change in the last 50-odd years of publishing. Our role has changed in some ways, but still the idea of getting those ideas out of the minds of the creator and into the minds of the learner or the user or the researcher is a very big and important part of what we do.

KENNEALLY: Right. In fact, I like the idea of building bridges. You think of the bridge from print to digital, the bridge from the researcher or the instructor to the learner – these are all important ways of building communities, and we’ll be hearing a good deal about that community-building throughout the program. It’s sort of a catchphrase of the internet that content is king. But here, Kiren, you want to explain why context is queen – that relevance and the targeted audience is really an important piece of how SAGE has approached its own digital transformation journey.

SHOMAN: Yeah. I’m glad you like the bridge metaphor. I’m increasingly sort of thinking that it has a lot of value besides the idea of that transfer. And in the past, we could always talk about ourselves as midwives, but increasingly it’s become more complicated. And I feel like if the bridge can be a wider metaphor – that it isn’t just about our enabling the transitions of ideas from one mind to the other, but the architecture sometimes that’s required to achieve that and hold it up as well for a lifetime of scholars to come is a very big and important part of what we as publishers can do – what all publishers can do.

So moving in to the notion of the context alongside the content, I think there’s been a lot of conversation that people listening will be feeling highly familiar with as well around what is a publisher’s role? I think five years ago, a lot of the conferences you would go to, there would be angsting about whether or not we’re moving away from being a certain type of a publisher into more of a service provider, and what was the role of a publisher? I think that that’s settled a lot. But the idea of talking about the value of content is absolutely core to what we do.

But real recognition of the place of how we serve that up and the role of technology solutions that enables us to make sure that we are providing that knowledge base or these new ideas in an environment that the user is increasingly expecting more – and we’re seeing a real range of different expectations amongst a range of different types of either readers, listeners, viewers, wherever they are in their own learning journey, can be quite different, and their expectations can be quite different.

So we as publishers need to understand where we put that content. The context in which it can sit is something we have to be fully responsible for at many times. So we need to think about the experience of the 19-year-old college student and how they can be looking at our content on – if they’re using Opera as their browser on their Galaxy tablet versus if they’re in the library on their computer – and thinking about how we are serving up that content in different ways.

KENNEALLY: Right. And it is a particular challenge, because the digital transformation isn’t just going on in publishing. It’s affecting all aspects of our lives, including education, and education itself is undergoing this transformation. The learning environments are flipping, as they say. So really this is a moving target for you when you are trying to determine just how people are learning, where they are learning, what they are looking for, what they are hoping to get out of their learning experience.

SHOMAN: That’s correct. That is correct. As you’re saying, the environment is changing, and loads of industries are having to engage with it. I know we’ll talk about video later, but just from the fact that we now know that 300 hours of video are uploaded onto YouTube every minute and that over 3 billion hours of YouTube are watched every month. Those are some statistics that are quite staggering when you think about what’s going in the world and how people are changing how they’re accessing and using and coming to content, and that in the next 30, 20 years, half of the world’s youth are going to be living in countries with mobile first or mobile online internet connections as a matter of course. So the expectation is definitely changing.

And then in terms of literally back into the education system, as you say, students and faculty, teachers, are coming at pedagogy in new ways – class assignments, self-guided learning, the flipped classroom model, where students are being expected or asked to do a different kind of work in advance of the class and then come in and have a different kind of experience in the class have been really interesting to observe. And I think when we look at the ways in which universities are responding to that by even changing how they build their classrooms and reorganizing their spaces, even in the library, but in the sort of seminar room, into more collaborative learning spaces – so a lot is changing in terms of how the universities are expecting students to consume information as well and what kind of experiences, I guess, they’re expecting to have.

KENNEALLY: Right. In fact, that’s a great way to introduce a discussion you would like to share with us around how SAGE has approached digital transformation. In particular, you’ve got an example of a recent effort to transform a book into an online course.

SHOMAN: Yeah. And as far as trying to – thinking about the question that you’re posing around what does digital transformation even mean, and what does it mean for us as publishers, we’ll all have very different probable ways of answering this question of what does digital transformation mean? But I think it’s definitely not simply about taking what we already had and digitizing it. It’s not just a question of digitizing existing assets. But it’s really recognizing that our industry is increasingly adopting technology and that we need to figure out how to innovate. I think some people are worried about innovate or face extinction. I don’t know if that’s entirely how we have to face it. But innovation really needs to mean embracing technology as a strategic competency.

And for us, thinking about what would be the example of how that could play out, I think this piece of work that we embarked on just in this year, actually – it’s only in beta at the moment, and we’re going into the market in January – is an example of where we quite specifically looked at a text that we published, Critical Thinking by Tom Chatfield. It was a very exciting text for us. It was highly innovative in its own way, but in a very print-centered way. So we put a lot of work and effort into making it incredibly engaging in print and with the author, who is a very fantastic digital tech philosopher as well as critical thinking scholar, really worked on the idea that this was not going to be a digital experience and it was not going to transfer to a digital experience as a book, although we were very interested in figuring out what it would look like to transfer it into an online course. So the question of moving a print book into an online experience that could be personalized to a different sort of student expectation and different need has been the challenge that we took on.

One of the first things that we did was look at what the print could do that could translate well into a digital environment and then get rid of every other idea. We brought in a digital learning designer. That was a whole new role for us, working alongside the editor – the traditional editor – who was superb at really getting alongside the digital learning designer and working to produce an engaging, independent, purely online course and making sure that we were doing it for the digital experience. So it wasn’t about adapting the text. We didn’t just take original content. We actually created it to be read anew, with the author very much involved, too, and experienced in a born-digital environment.

So I think for us, that will be a really interesting case study for ourselves to watch and learn from as to whether or not – you know, how do we translate that author voice into a course that’s highly engaging, highly visual, but has a lot of other author elements, if you like, in, too, because our learning designer needed to also help come up with some new material alongside as well.

KENNEALLY: Right. What is important to me as I was listening to you describe that process, Kiren Shoman, is the collaborative nature of this approach to digital transformation and the collaboration you described with the author himself, with the digital learning designer, with the editors and others. That really is again back to this notion of bridges – bridges from print to digital, from authors to editors to designers.

SHOMAN: Yeah, so that’s incredibly important. It’s so much an important part of what we do that we’re working alongside academics as examples of absolute key partners – they are our authors in the main – and that we have a really key job to do to understand what it is that they have in their heads that can translate into something that goes back to Sara’s usable knowledge or enable people to understand concepts in ways that really work for them.

So I think for us, it’s a question of recognizing who our partners are, and I think increasingly for us, it’s the librarian as well as the author. And also the question of who the end user is sometimes is a little bit removed from us than the person who’s perhaps responsible for making a decision about purchasing our content, so maybe thinking about them as gatekeepers – the different people that they need to appeal to – and how we need to use digital publishing perhaps in different ways than we did in a print-only environment to be in front of the right people that are making those decisions, persuading the faculty member to use our material, to recommend to students, to reference the journal article that should be used, but also really talking to the librarian, who often has the budget authority in some of these big projects. They need to be convinced that the content is delivered in a way that they will find useful, accessible, that will enable them to offer their patrons something that they can really use and access, and just basically that they can stand proud that they’re providing a ubiquitous learning experience for thousands of people across their university system.

So we have a lot of people to make sure that we are serving really well in terms of how that content ends up serving the needs of the teacher or even the student and working with the different partners that make sure that that gets well done. And that’s before you’ve even reached the student, and of course we need to be thinking clearly about matching well with students’ needs, making sure that we’re publishing and putting out there is engaging and really enabling them to learn effectively.

KENNEALLY: Right. Indeed, this building of bridges – it creates an entire network. That network is – you can cross from one side of the bridge to the other and back again. So you are in communication and direct contact with all of these various stakeholders and finding from them what they are looking for, what they want. Often what they are telling you is, of course, based on data that they have. Then you yourself are able to collect data. This is really the nub of the digital transformation. It’s communication. It’s networks. It’s data-driven.

SHOMAN: I agree. And what’s really true about what you say is that our particular customers – especially, I think, particularly librarians – we are working in this industry with people who really know what they want when it comes to metadata. They’re a particularly metadata-aware audience. While that means that they hold us to high standards and we need to be really good at responding to that, it comes with a great deal of support in terms of what they can tell us about what’s useful for them, and knowing themselves what it is that they want helps us be better at providing it to them. But you’re spot on that there’s a world of having much better data, access to data, and a better discussion about data that can help us construct a stronger response and, hopefully, play in the market better.

KENNEALLY: Right. And we’re describing here, Kiren, a kind of an ideal situation. The reality, of course, is that people are on a spectrum of digital adoption and digital transformation themselves. There’s everyone from the early adopters to the refuseniks. And I can imagine – forgive any members of the academic world in the audience here – that in academia, you really do see that. You see people who are the real sort of technology geeks, and then you see people who like things the way they are.

SHOMAN: Yes, we do. We really do. We see people who are like on the cutting edge, who are innovators, who want to grab something and go with it. And then there is a lot of conservatism in education, for understandable reasons, in terms of – particularly, I think, in terms of rolling out teaching and dealing with huge classes and so forth, and a lot of people who are really wanting to push forward and do something different.

I was interested – I think earlier this month, there was a report that Inside Higher Ed released which was around faculty approaches to technology and tells a really fascinating story that really underlines the point that you’re making, which is that you get a real range. I think some of what they were showing was that in terms of faculty support of increased use of educational technology, they had – I think 32% of their respondents would say that they were fully supportive of increased use of educational technologies. There were some who were kind of on the borderline and some who were absolutely not. And it’s interesting, because those who had had some experience of giving, let’s say, an online course themselves had become a little bit more positive about its ability to be equivalent, perhaps, to an in-person class that they had more experience of.

So I think what that’s telling us is that there is a preparedness to try. It might be a bit slow. I think the confidence will grow as they do more of it. So we’ll see. And that’s why we’re trying to make sure that we are putting material out there and learning as fast as we can from what we’re getting back, but knowing that in some cases, we’re sometimes a little bit early, and we need to factor in whether or not the market is ready. And the market will be different in different regions as well.

Then there’s, of course, whether or not there’s just this push that’s going to come from the new generations of students that come in, back to the figures I was quoting before about expectations of what kind of content they want to engage with. That will change education as well, and institutions will be embracing that, I think, in a different way.

I think librarians are often much more ahead. They’re often the ones that are trying new things, because they’re really seeing particularly where technology can make a lot of efficiencies as well in terms of workflows and processes, and they can really embrace that.

KENNEALLY: Right. And the efficiencies aren’t just in the work processes, as you say, but really in terms of the budgets and the finances that these librarians are struggling with. They want to do more, and they often have to do more with less.

We are speaking today with Kiren Shoman – a program we are calling Building Bridges to Knowledge, a webinar presented by Copyright Clearance Center.

We’ve alluded to this already, Kiren Shoman, about the particular advantage of digital – the communication that it makes possible, the collaboration that it makes possible – but it also allows you at SAGE and anyone listening to collect data that can be finely probed to learn more and to keep this a continuing process. Tell us about those advantages of digital as you see them.

SHOMAN: Sure, yeah. So yeah, usage data is a wonderful thing, because we can track, we can analyze how our material is being used. We can tell who is watching – not who is watching videos, but how videos are being watched, which ones they’re choosing, how long they’re spending watching them, from what kind of digital environment are they watching the video. Are they on their mobile? Are they on a machine, on a computer, a laptop? Are they embedding the video into a learning management system and using it in that way? So these different contexts in which they’re using or accessing content is incredibly helpful to us and can really enable our acquisition strategy as well as our marketing and sales strategies to get us to really understand our customers and our users and think about where it is that we can add more value.

And I think it’s developing to such a state that technology will be able to tell us, or is already able to tell us, how long students spend on certain areas. That can feed back into the faculty member teaching or the publisher. That gives you a feel for where things perhaps are particularly biting in terms of a challenge or where maybe students perhaps are enjoying a particular more engaging kind of content and spending more time on it.

So I think that this is something that – obviously in the past, we’ve got out a book, and we just sort of rely perhaps on written reviews or feedback from individuals. But you don’t get that sort of aggregated data and that ability to really roll it up and see if it makes a difference and if there are different contexts. As I was saying, there’s regional contexts, but there’s even – within the higher ed system, there will be different universities with different kinds of missions, and we can see different behavior according to the actual end customers within even what might otherwise be considered homogenous markets.

KENNEALLY: Right. I’m sorry, but this collection of data that you’re getting, the responses to the works, it’s coming in real time or in near real time, and that makes an important difference as well.

SHOMAN: You’re right, it is. It’s coming in real time. We can look at it and refresh that information all the time. Yeah. I mean, the challenge is – you know, next on us is how to find the time to be able to properly assess every piece of data that could be coming in to us. But I know that we look at our usage on at least a monthly basis. And if we wanted to dive in, we can look at it in a more day-to-day or a weekly basis. But it gives us –

KENNEALLY: Right. And within SAGE, it’s – I’m sorry. Go ahead, Kiren.

SHOMAN: I was going to say it gives us the opportunity to be responsive as well and to be able to, if you like, go in and make corrections or refresh content – sort of add more content in that might be more of value. Where we can start to see a particular trend, we can more quickly say, right, you know, that’s been out for that amount of time. We can already see that this is really resonating. Or we’re getting feedback from this resonance that maybe we should be adding something different in around here. So that’s an area that we’re now, happily, able to have moved on. Since the launch of some of our collections, we can start moving into that area of being responsive to how the content is being engaged with.

KENNEALLY: Let’s go back, then, to 2015, to the launch of SAGE video. Here we are now approaching 2019. Tell us about that journey and about the things you’ve learned.

SHOMAN: Yeah. So it’s been an amazing journey, and it was definitely – I think back in 2013, we were having conversations about how the environment was changing and what were we seeing if we looked at the wider trend of change that we could see in terms of the higher ed market. Video was just coming up more and more as a way in which we could see that students and faculty were engaging.

And we did some research that interviewed a number of different stakeholders, be it students, faculty, librarians, and were getting some very strong feedback around a percentage of faculty that were already using video in the classroom. I think it was something like 92% of the survey that we did was telling us that that level of use in the classroom already existed. What was interesting, though, was that they were really at times frustrated about how much work they had to do to find educationally valuable video. It was often going to YouTube and finding free resources, which made sense. In some cases, there was video in the library, but it was often – it was in a particular physical copy that they had to go and put into their machines to play in the class. So they had a real – a want, a desire to deliver on video, and in many cases, obstacles.

So we felt that we had the opportunity to think about ourselves as moving into a new type of program alongside our traditional publishing of books and journals to move into a video stream. Actually, it was a big question for us about that it was going to be streaming video, so therefore the streaming cats, because we needed it to be able to be served online, and we could see that there was a change coming in terms of streaming video was going to be taking over, rather than us doing DVDs and sending them out. So we decided to look at it in the same way that we look at ourselves in terms of whatever we want to do and the market we’re looking at, where the disciplinary needs are, what those needs are, and where we felt that we had strengths to be able to serve those needs. And for us, we focused in on the social sciences and on some of the subject areas that you can see up on the slide there.

KENNEALLY: Right. And one of the things you already had was access, relationships with academics and with learners – with the students themselves. So to understand the best ways to deliver the content and the kinds of content that would be most useful, most impactful, you could already have those conversations, even as you’re developing the program. It’s really interesting to learn about. What’s been the success so far? What are the kinds of things that have worked with the video program?

SHOMAN: For us, what we’ve really seen is that the understanding that we have that there were – different kinds of video would be useful in different kinds of contexts – back to the contexts, always. And that really has worked. So we can study the different kinds of video that we’ve produced within the collection and see how it’s used differentially.

So for instance, as an example for what I mean, we have videos that are tutorials. They’re very simple. The faculty member is giving a tutorial on a particular topic, and they’re keeping it short and focused. And there are slides that they have alongside them, but they’re also speaking to the camera as if to the student.

And then we have what we call in practice, where we’re going into the field and where the job of that video is to try and enable a student to understand the environment, perhaps, that they’re looking to study or see how a theory might work in terms of the real world, which is often a big part of a learning objective.

Other kinds of video are the traditional, so we have a small amount of the content that we sell – we have licensed or acquired documentaries or we are making our own little mini-documentaries, taking the student through a particular journey. And then we have some interviews, where students and researchers have the chance to see the person who wrote that famous book or who made that big wave in their particular environment – see them talk about where that came from, reflect on where it’s taking them next and what their next research agenda is. So being able to really understand how it’s used tells – so we can see where some of those are particularly resonating particularly well in some subject areas, and that reinforces what we should be doing in the future.

KENNEALLY: Well, you’ve actually done some work, some research, to assess this impact. There’s a paper that’s available online, and when we follow up on today’s webinar, we will provide a link to that paper. Interesting that a research publisher has conducted its own research. But you really are there at the forefront of this new educational trend. You mentioned one of the things that the study that Professor Karpicke from Purdue discovered, which is that it’s important that the learner encounter the researcher or the faculty member in a kind of a one-to-one relationship. And sort of defying expectations, it’s not just about graphics and cartoons. People want to see real people on video.

SHOMAN: Yeah, that was really interesting. Yeah, so my colleague, Michael Carmichael, worked with Professor Karpicke, and also there was another academic who separately did an amazingly wide-ranging literature review of how video is used in education and has written up a literature review around it, and that’s available in the study, too. But Professor Karpicke’s experiment was taking 100 undergraduates and studying how they – they were asked to look at different SAGE videos to then allow him to understand how useful it had been in terms of them being able to remember concepts and also in terms of them being able to report whether or not they felt engaged or happy about the learning experience that they had had.

It’s from a combination of these two pieces of work, which are summarized in that whitepaper, that we’ve also been able to pull out some key learnings. The one you mentioned is really interesting – that students will often prefer to be watching a tutorial and wanting to see the faculty member, the researcher, the expert. They want to see that person’s face and watch them engaging with the student, even if it’s through the lens of a camera.

There’s other things that were really interesting to us, so being really careful about cognitive overload and that students are often – or learners are often sort of overwhelmed by too much information. There’s an interesting example of that, which many people might have seen, where somebody’s showing an experiment by asking a viewer to watch the video while they’re showing a card trick. And then it’s only afterwards, when they play the video back slowly, that you begin to realize that they’ve changed their clothes, they’ve changed a lot of different aspects of what was around that person. There’s a gorilla that’s gone through in the background. But just trying to understand that in the context of a video where students or watchers are spending their time and what are they being able to take away from that experience – and not to put too much into it and instead try and make sure that we’re really careful to focus in on what the objective of the video is.

So for us, we spend time on each idea of each video that we want to do, so we take our discipline and we really work out what the different videos are that should be formed. And then they each need to understand what their learning objective is and how wide-ranging the appeal of that video can be in this educational context. And then we move in to actually scripting and working with authors – now called talent – and get it done.

KENNEALLY: Right. What is fascinating, Kiren Shoman, is that in this very powerful world of technology, some simple rules apply. Keep it simple. Less is more. And when it comes to the publishers, of course content – that still remains, well, king, as we were saying at the beginning. And to be prepared for this new venture into video, you had to work with your content to get it into shape, to take existing content and repurpose it, as well as to create new digital-native content. Tell us about that.

SHOMAN: Yeah. What we did was we had a good amount of video material that had been produced across different elements of the business. So I think one of the first challenges was trying to find a place where we could actually have a repository that was searchable as well, and so making sure that it had its own metadata for internal use, so that we could figure out what was valuable, where it was useful, and where it could be reused, if at all. So there was a good amount of work really using our colleagues across SAGE, even if they weren’t involved with the video team that was building these products, to help us assess that content and to inform us, especially if they’d been involved in it, what its educational or pedagogical value had been.

And we also did look at and make some acquisitions of what we felt to be really strong educational video that we wanted to be able to pull into our collection.

There is a whole new team now at SAGE that are working on video, with job titles that we never had before – video producers and video project managers and videographers and video editors and video curators – as a new part of the range of job descriptions that we have. And that’s alongside an incredibly key group, which is the project and product managers, who really worked on getting some of the most important things done. While the editorial team was working on thinking about the content, they were thinking about making sure that the metadata was strong enough and good enough for ingestion and refinement, working with vendors, as we did, breaking down video into different segments, doing QA of the metadata. So there was a lot of work to be done to make sure that we would be able to offer good search and browse and access and even personalization. So the work of a team there was highly transformative.

KENNEALLY: Right. And you mentioned, Kiren, that those in our audience who come from the library community, they’ll understand the importance of metadata. It’s something that just can’t be underestimated, it sounds to me, because that searchable repository of your own content that you were working with in the first place – it needs the proper tagging, it needs the proper metadata. And then moving out into the learning community, it needs to be findable, discoverable, and again, it’s all about the metadata.

SHOMAN: Absolutely. It is. For us to be able to enable that connections can be made between one type of content and another, especially if a learner in a system is doing a search – that they want to have the right results come up and at the right level, so that they can really have what they need quickly and move into learning rather than staying in search.

KENNEALLY: Right. We will send along with our follow-up e-mail to everyone listening on the program today a link to an example of one of these videos. Here we had mentioned about – cats are important to the internet. Well, here’s a program – and you can tell us about it briefly, Kiren – where dogs are important, because it’s looking at educational counseling using animals and something that is offered through an organization called Therapy Dogs International.

SHOMAN: Yeah. So what this is is this is one example – this is actually specifically what we would call an in-practice video, just to give you a feel for bringing those out to this example. And what this video is about is it’s about Tivo, a seven-year-old black Labrador retriever. He’s part of the Wellness Center at Northern Illinois University. And the video is basically about how useful he is in helping students who are in counseling or who are dealing with loneliness or stress or other well-being concerns on campus. And it’s gorgeous. I mean, it’s a lovely video. But you can see the power of the messaging and the role that the dog actually can have in this context.

But what’s interesting about it as well is if you look into the metadata behind it, you can get a feel for what kind of questions we’ve been asking. So as an example, the expected searches that we’re seeing and tagging at will include animal-assisted therapy. It’ll include college students and communities, educational counseling, informal communication, social and emotional aspects of learning, stress management, and so forth. I think that’s one of the interesting challenges that we have, because with video, we have access to the transcript, and that can be searchable, too, but we also have to make a judgment about where it could be used and the different kinds of ways in which it’s appropriate – so what could our students be searching for – and make sure that that’s all plugged into the metadata.

KENNEALLY: Yeah. Before we do get to questions, I want to be sure we emphasize something which is about the platform and the need for really robust platform functionality. You were describing the situation that this video is addressing, where students may be in a stressful environment and how they can be helped with these therapy dogs. But the other time that special considerations come into play is on this platform, it has to be functional for all kinds of learners. Here in the US, we have the Americans with Disabilities Act. We have certain concerns around various kinds of record-keeping. Of course, in Europe is the GDPR – the General Data Protection Regulations, I believe it is – which involves privacy. All of these things are important and have to be taken into account. You need closed captioning and even possibly transcripts and so forth. It really needs to be a robust platform.

SHOMAN: That’s right. And I don’t know – like if we look at the picture of that snapshot of how the platform looks, there are a number of different things that I can just very quickly mention. The red buttons on the top right-hand side are all about citation and embedding and sharing tools. There are the keyboard shortcuts as well, which is answering an accessibility need. And then moving down, there’s downloadable and searchable transcripts, so there’s the ability to move the transcript into a PDF.

Also, the ultra-scroll is on at this moment, so if you were playing a video, you would be able to see the transcript moving according to how the video is progressing. But if you jump ahead and click on the transcript at another point, the video will jump along and find you. So that scrolling transcript is another one of the functionalities that we thought was really important. And then if we hovered over the screen, if we were doing a live demo, we would see the options coming up for closed captioning, which is really important. Changing the playback rate, because students might want to speed it up, but some students might want to slow it down. So there’s an opportunity for that.

And then significantly, there’s a lot of discussion about whether or not video needs to be a certain length. There’s a lot of research that shows that students only actually watch a certain amount of video. The opportunity for the faculty member or even a student to create a clip means that they are in charge of how long the video is. They have access to the whole thing, but they can choose a smaller part of it. And also just above, underneath the title of educational counseling, there’s a segment line there, so you could click on that and you could move ahead – it’s kind of like chapters. So you could move to segment three, which is talking about looking at a particular experience of a student with the dog in an actual counseling session, for instance. These elements were a very big part of us scoping out what we felt was going to be able to allow us to offer something that the market would really want.

KENNEALLY: Right. Well, we hope everyone will get a chance to play around with the video platform themselves. We again will provide a link to a sample of the SAGE video program, and you can see the various aspects that Kiren Shoman was just telling us about. Again, they really are important, and they really – even though we were saying at one point, Kiren, that simplicity is perhaps a key to success, it does also need to be very complex. You need to be very thoughtful and think through all of the various stages that people will want to encounter as they interact with this content.

SHOMAN: Yeah, it’s a bit of double bind, isn’t it? In a sense, it’s almost as if we need to really engage with the complexity, but we need to allow the user to feel as if it’s a simple experience.

KENNEALLY: Well, it has been a pleasure to speak with Kiren Shoman. We’ve provided, I think, a very complex look at digital transformation and how SAGE is building bridges to knowledge. We hope it’s a useful case study to the publishers listening online as they undertake their own digital transformation journey as well as for those who are in the learning community themselves, at universities and elsewhere, as they think about offering it to their own clients, their own students, and so on.

We’ve enjoyed speaking today with Kiren Shoman. She’s vice president, editorial, for SAGE Publishing. She’s been on the line with us from her office in London. Kiren Shoman, thank you so much.

SHOMAN: A real pleasure. Thanks for having me, Chris.

KENNEALLY: We appreciate your sharing your time with us today, and we look forward to having you join us for another program very soon. For all of us at Copyright Clearance Center, thank you very much.

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