Impact of the pandemic on Streaming Media adoption at SDSU: Streaming in the time of Covid
This piece is co-authored by Tim Tully, Linda Salem, and Wil Weston of San Diego State University Library
The writing was on the proverbial wall with regard to increased demand for streaming media pre-Covid-19; however libraries anticipated that they had a few more years to address the growing demand before the pandemic led to the whole wall being covered with writing. No amount of prescient discussion was ever going to prepare libraries for the necessary speed of transition during the pandemic years or for the still yet to be determined consequences of this rapid adoption of streaming services.
Collections and Course Materials
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
— Dr. Ian Malcolm, from Jurassic Park
There has been steady and increasing interest in streaming media and non-textual resources for instruction by teaching faculty. And, accordingly, university libraries have been moving to meet increased college student needs. University libraries have steadily moved towards supporting the development and hosting of Open Education Resources (OER) and Open Access (OA) Textbooks because textbook costs are widely recognized in higher education as a significant burden to students. In response to this student burden, the California State University System (CSU) began the Affordable Learning Solutions (ALS) initiative with the primary goal of saving students money on the now-significant expense of textbooks. However, supporting textbooks or purchasing course materials has historically not been a significant part of the collection development process in the past and has been considered more of a side role of library services, such as maintaining library course reserves. And there are good reasons for this: new editions are released regularly, they are expensive, tied to a single course, and the use of the textbook has been typically not available in a digital format or only available in one or three user licenses, which still requires students to buy the accompanying online course assessments. But, they boil down to essentially two issues: Cost and long-term use/viability in the collection. The collection argument is simply that this is not building a library research collection; and for underfunded libraries (almost all libraries now) this is a real problem.
Like textbooks, acquiring streaming media for courses shares some of the same acquisition problems for libraries – they are expensive and their use is frequently tied to a single course. Additionally, they are frequently just rentals and, like textbook purchases, are not contributing to building the collection (whether research or instructional). I will note that some of this is changing; for example Kanopy does offer the ability to permanently acquire specific streaming titles through perpetual licensing. However, this was the streaming media landscape (mainly rentals) before the pandemic and there was an immediate need brought on by the pandemic for teaching faculty to incorporate more streaming content into their courses.
SDSU’s Streaming Experience.
"Your past experiences are valuable lessons to you now, learn from them"
— Rafiki, from The Lion King
Prior to the pandemic SDSU had a number of subscription based streaming platforms in place: AVON- Alexander Street Press, Kanopy, and Swank. While AVON was subscribed to as a package; Kanopy and Swank titles were purchased on a title by title basis by instructor request only. These safeguards were in place primarily to control for cost and ensure the use of the leased resource. Additionally, SDSU has a fairly sizable DVD collection that helped control for some of these costs. However, the pandemic changed all of that and eliminated easy use and access of the DVD collection. SDSU, like so many other universities and colleges, had to switch to an online only instructional modality during the Covid-19 pandemic. Since this represented such a large shift in collection development practice and a pivot towards a larger curricular support role for library collections, we did a study to see what happened.
This study examined the change in use of the library’s streaming media from the previous academic year to the Fall 2020/Spring 2021 online modality at SDSU. We tracked how the online viewing differed by platform, by class, and by subject from the previous year. Additionally, we examined how university and institutional policy changes pre-pandemic, along with the implementation of a new Learning Management System and HiFlex course design. “SDSU Flex Institute” training for all SDSU instructors during the summer 2020 may have influenced course implementation of library streaming media. The SDSU library offered sessions at the Flex institute on how to embed library resources in Canvas, one resource being streaming media. Finally, we surveyed the instructors that used library streaming content in their online courses. These were some of the big takeaways from this study.
Virtually every faculty member queried stated they chose films based on expertise, scholarly literature, or recommendations from other academics and relevance to the curriculum. There was only one instance where a faculty member indicated they had searched the full Kanopy holdings (as a discovery tool) for the films they used in their classes. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic resulted in a large increase in streaming media usage, and the pandemic influenced these changes; additionally, this increase was uniformly true across all of the streaming platforms.
*Swank adoption could have influenced Kanopy usage decrease in 2019-2020
The overall trend for faculty was a general increase in the quantity of films as well as switching assigned viewing to outside of class time regardless of whether they attended the Flex Institute. The "Other" selections indicated working with non-library units to show films digitally that did not have streaming licenses. A large percentage of faculty adopted streaming and changed the assigned viewing from in class (one view) to out of class (multiple views).
Did the pandemic change how you used films in your course?
Responses from faculty who attended the SDSC Flex Institute in 2020
Responses from faculty who did not attend the SDSC Flex Institute in 2020
How did the pandemic change how you use films in your course?
Responses from faculty who attended the SDSC Flex Institute in 2020
Responses from faculty who did not attend the SDSC Flex Institute in 2020
Overall, faculty adopted out of class viewing despite Flex attendance status, but they were more likely to make this change if they attended Flex. Interestingly, only those faculty that attended the Flex training made the switch to showing films in class. Finally, the increased usage did not correspond with more direct links from the learning management system (LMS) (the most used faculty referral mechanism); however, this also suggests that over the pandemic more students likely adopted recreational viewing across the streaming platforms, Kanopy and Swank.
Conclusion
“There are two paths you can take, Enola. Yours... or the path others choose for you.”
— Eudoria Holmes, from Enola Holmes.
The amount of streaming content and the demand for it is only going to grow. Library budgets are strained and likely to remain so as they fight to keep up with rising costs and demands for new library services in support of the curriculum. Most streaming content is currently delivered as a service and still rarely offered with perpetual rights; we can only hope that this changes soon and it looks like it may be slowly moving that direction. But will that change come quickly enough? Who knows? Never-the-less, currently, while acknowledging the immediate curricular demands, streaming content delivered as a service is not building your collection. Streaming content is important. Streaming content has a place in the library collection and as a library service too. However, its importance and the fiscal commitment we make to supporting it, will be something that each academic library will have to determine for themselves.
Author Bios
Tim Tully is the Business Librarian and acted as the Assistant Head of Collections during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Linda Salem MLIS, MA Ed, is the Assistant Head of Collections at San Diego State University Library. She served as interim Head of Collections between April 2020 through June 2022.
Wil Weston MLIS, Ph.D. is the Head of Library Collections at the San Diego State University (SDSU) Library.
