Making on-line print ordering a success at London South Bank University

There are a number of reasons why academics need to print for their students in a university. For example, dyslexic students or those with a visual handicap or just for a successful blended teaching and learning experience. This blended teaching and learning process will help with multisensory mixed media learning and retention in the student experience.

There is an on-going argument about which is more sustainable for the whole-life use: paper or electronic media? However, there is no debate about the pedagogic advantages, efficiency and effectiveness of using on-line print ordering for print jobs as compared with the Academic travelling from home, to their university office, printing out a copy of their teaching and learning materials and then, either taking that copy to the printroom or to a local photocopier to reproduce second (or third or fourth) generation copies for their students.

Academic staff spending their time photocopying is very inefficient and a total waste of their expert knowledge and time. Research at London South Bank University (LSBU) has shown that with 800 academic staff, the time spent by academics photocopying their own teaching and learning materials is equal to the time of 10 academic staff. When you add to this waste of academic staff time, with the lost opportunity cost of intellectual property in not keeping a and reusing digital copy of generated academic content in other media, then this business process is the economics of the madhouse.

The change from the status quo of printing out a master original and photocopying the masters and moving to providing digital copy and first generation originals for all students is a clear advantage in making a better quality student experience for the current IT literate generation of students.

The challenge comes in getting some academic’s to change their cultural habits of relying on tangible hardcopy originals and then either wasting their own time photocopying the original or sending the hardcopy original to the print room to photocopy.

To address this matter in 1992 LSBU started offing academic staff the option to supply teaching and learning materials in digital form to be printed. This was by five and a quarter, three and three and a half inch floppy disc s as well as the local areas network for larger files. However, take up was slow due to a number of reasons. From 1992 to 2000 the percentage of on-line print jobs never rose above 10% of the total.

In 2000, Alan Lee, LSBU Document & Copyright Services Manager, undertook extensive research in to this problem and came to the conclusion that it was about information, marketing, cost benefit understanding and culture. As a result of these finding he addressed these matters and commissioned a customer walk-through of the of the online business process (links below).

Today at LSBU 80% of the teaching and learning materials are submitted to the printroom on-line, making a substantial saving in carbon, increased staff IT skills, and quality improvement in the student teaching and learning materials. There is also a process to capture and harvest in a document repository on-line original teaching and learning materials, set to the printroom for reuse in a number of media.

See http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/sdu/5min/olprint/ or http://tiny.cc/sendonline

Picture of robot climbing glass wall at London South Bank University.