SAGE Campus 

CONTENT

Designed for graduate and undergraduate students, SAGE Campus is an online learning platform that offers nearly 30 self-paced courses covering the fundamentals of data literacy, social science research methods, data science, and publication. Courses include interactive text and video content, lectures, quizzes, and practical exercises.

Launched in 2017, SAGE Campus switched to a library-focused business model in 2020. The courses (collectively equivalent to more than 250 learning hours) are grouped into nine learning pathways, including “learn how to handle numbers and data,” “learn to program in Python,” “learn how to conduct research online,” and “learn about the journal publishing landscape.” Number of hours needed for completion ranges from one hour (Article Acceptance to Promotion) to 40 (Interactive Visualization with R). Designed by academic or independent experts, each course comes with a syllabus and other learning materials and is split into three or more modules. Learners receive a certificate upon course completion. Institutions cannot pick and choose courses to which to subscribe—one price provides unlimited access to everything, including new courses as they are added.

SAGE Campus is a late entrant to the online learning space. O’Reilly, Skillsoft, and LinkedIn have traditionally sold self-paced online learning solutions to libraries and universities. Coursera and other massive open online course (MOOC) providers do so too. Against the competition’s vast course catalogues and stellar brand recognition, SAGE Campus makes it easy for faculty to adopt courses and builds on SAGE’s core niche strength in data science and research methods.

USABILITY

SAGE Campus is mobile-friendly—suitable for tablets and functional using smartphones. Videos come with closed captions and transcripts for accessibility. A dashboard shows learners all their completed, in-progress, and assigned courses and allows them to enroll in new courses. There are no limits on concurrent enrollment. Progress through a course may require learners to click on or interact with each video lecture, block of text, and other items, which in the absence of live instructors or graded authentic assessments is a reasonable way to gauge participation.

The chief value-add of SAGE Campus is that it can be incorporated into regular college courses. Subscribing libraries can assign Cohort Administrator roles to faculty user accounts on request. These Cohort Administrator permissions enable the instructors to create groupings or cohorts of students, invite students to join cohorts using unique enrollment keys that the faculty must share with their students, and view the progress of all students enrolled in their course cohorts. Library administrative dashboards list all users, cohorts, and courses. They show enrollment and average progress by course and permit librarians to edit and suspend user accounts as desired.

PRICING

Pricing is $6,750–$22,500 for an annual subscription and $33,749–$112,495 for a purchase, depending on the size and type of institution.

VERDICT

Given its relatively small number of high-quality, specialized courses, SAGE Campus offers the greatest return on investment to large research universities. Libraries should assess curricular needs and likelihood of faculty adoption carefully before investing in this learning solution.

Michael Rodriguez is Collections Strategist, University of Connecticut, Storrs.