Online learning is quickly gaining in importance in U.S. higher education, but little rigorous evidence exists as to its effect on student learning outcomes.

As online courses continue to gain in popularity at colleges and universities throughout the country, knowledge about the effectiveness of this mode of instruction, relative to that of traditional, face-to-face courses, becomes increasingly important. A 2009 report by the U.S. Department of Education provided a meta-analysis of articles published up to 2008, examining the relative gains in learning outcomes from the different delivery formats.

This Ithaka S+R report is a landscape review of important developments in online learning today. It is the first in a series that will provide leaders in higher education with lessons learned from existing online learning efforts to help accelerate productive use of these systems in the future. The goal of this research was to understand what benefits colleges and universities expect from online learning technologies, what barriers they face in implementing them, and how these technologies might be best shaped to serve different types of institutions.

Ithaka S+R and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) are studying how libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies are sustaining digitized special collections.

This two-year, two-phase research project focuses on members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), 126 institutions in the United States and Canada, and will involve a survey and case studies. The survey aims to:

Tens of millions of dollars, pounds, and euros are invested each year by government agencies and private foundations to develop and support digital resources in the not-for-profit sector. As budgets tighten, will these digital resources be able to survive and thrive?

This question is at the heart of the Ithaka S+R Case Studies in Sustainability series, a multi-year, international exploration of the strategies being used to support digital initiatives over the long term.

In 2009 Ithaka S+R investigated the sustainability strategies of twelve digital content projects in the higher education and cultural heritage sectors in the US, UK, France, Germany, and Egypt. Two years and one economic crisis later, Ithaka S+R, with the generous support of the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance, decided to revisit the original twelve case studies to see how their models had held up, where weaknesses might be starting to show, and what new strategies project leaders were adopting in response.