Queensland revolutionises the state of internet printing and publishing

A dramatic change in the relationship of academics to their schools and academies, as well as to their students, encapsulates the impact of the internet not only on the printing industry but also on the wider society. Gone are the days when students at colleges and universities were given free course notes as part of their education, only having to fork out for textbooks. Nowadays lecturers create their own course notes and post them on the internet, either through their own private home pages or through the institution’s internet portal.

In many cases the lecturers refuse to allow the institution to get anywhere near their course notes, fearful as much for their own academic freedom as for scrutiny of their compliance with copyright laws – generally 10 per cent of a text book can be quoted, providing the institution has signed on with the Copyright Association. (It will come as no surprise in these plagiarist riven times to learn that lecturer’s have been known to copy more than the requisite amount.) Academics, not abreast of the latest developments in digital imaging, often post their notes in eccentric formats, a nightmare to download and reproduce,

The result is that the situation for students has rapidly deteriorated from the days when they were handed Xeroxed copies of course notes by the lecturers. In many institutions they are now simply given the web site address and told to go fossick for the course materials themselves. Either that or they are handed a CD. Not surprisingly students, like most of the wider population, want printed course notes.

But to print out sometimes hundreds of pages on single-sided home copiers, or at the whim of digital printers who speak a language all of their own, is daunting at least for your average humanities student. And ruinously expensive.

The light shines through in the Sunshine state.

IIn a rare example of coincidence, or synchronicity, the in-plant printing divisions of two Queensland institutions of higher learning have come up with different systems for solving the dilemma. The University of Queensland’s Col Bruce has developed PODExpress (print on demand), while Brian Evans, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in pioneering FlexiPrint. PODExpress was recently recognised with an Xplor International Award for Innovation

PODExpress is the more ambitious of the two systems, addressing the chaos of un-corralled university lecturers, committed to keeping the institution out of interfering in their academic freedom. This extends to the format they put their matrials onto their own home pages, sometimes even resorting to the PowerPoint files they use in lectures.

PODExpress addresses the problem by allowing students to access the websites through its own portal, selecting the course notes required and ordering them online to be printed out and paid for at the University’s bookshop and printery. The system translates the course material into a Postscript file combining materials in print friendly manner.

POD also scans in course notes from readers, cleaning them up and making them into publishable material.

The workflow is a remarkably simple system for taming what are the consequences of an academic rush to the internet with no thought of the output ramifications. Did they seriously expect students to do their entire course reading on a monitor?

In the one format

FlexiPrint has the esier job of it with QUT mandating that course notes are held in PDF format.

It focuses on allowing students to get printed copies of the materials without having to download the files and without necessarily having to visit a nominated computer. QUT wants students to pay for material when it is ordered, so they can easily collect it without queuing at any on of the three campuses served by the in-plant.

The online material is drawn from discrete silos under the protection of their departments – Online Teaching documents (OLT) and the copyright protected Course Material Database (CMD).

In a fascinating presentation at this week’s NIPPA conference in Darwin, Brian Evans, manager of the printery, walked the audience through the technicalities of the system, how it came into being and what its intended outcomes are. That it was all rushed into being within a semester (August 03 to January 04) after yet another administrative change of mind makes it all the more impressive.

Equally earth shattering is the shift to regarding the students as clients rather than cash cow supplicants. It provides students with loose-leaf sheets and a number of simple manual finishing options they can operate themselves. Orders can range across numerous courses, although access is restricted to course the student has signed up for, and the course notes can be mailed to the student’s home. An online shopping basket is mooted.

The fact that two such systems exist in proximity to one another and operate with such relative simplicity may obscure their groundbreaking stature. The move to the internet has upturned the academic world, along with the educational publishing establishment. Accusations abound that compiling extensive course notes rather than relying on published textbooks will spell the end of real academic publishing. Charges of wholesale copyright theft are fired off at some of the most respected universities and colleges. The Copyright Agency faces an almost impossible task to audit compliance.

This maelstrom should not obscure the fact that there has been a fundamental shift in academic practices and that it is the skills and process understanding of in-plant printers that are now making it work in an efficient way. There is much more that needs to be done, but to date the only people talking unmitigated commonsense are the members of NIPPA.