Hybrid Learning

I really like the idea of hybrid learning.  After going through two online courses (this one and one in my undergrad) I can say with confidence that having at least one or two in-person sessions with the instructor or entire class would have made my experience in these courses much better.  I think having that extra personal connection would definitely motivate me to work harder and also make me feel more in touch with the course content.  I see Keelan at school at least once a week, and chatting with her about this course face-to-face makes me feel much more connected to the class and my classmates. 

SL is of course very useful to overcome these obstacles, and adds a hybrid element to this exclusively online course.  However, in my opinion, nothing can completely replace human interaction. 

I know some people prefer distance courses to in-class.  As I’m a bigger fan in-class sessions, I’m curious to know how the people who prefer online courses feel about the idea of hybrid learning?  

Mobile Devices & Distance Learning

I agree with the general sentiment of this week’s articles: that mobile devices have become extremely popular and that that educational institutions and libraries must capitalize on this popularity to remain current and effectively reach their students/patrons.  I was especially interested in the idea of increasing the use of mobile phones in education in developing countries where most people have a cell phone though they may not have access to computers or the physical spaces of educational institutions.   While I agree that mobile devices could be invaluable in this type of situation (I remember in particular the example given of villagers in a small local clinic being able to text with a doctor in a city hospital)  I don’t think basic cell phones  can effectively be used as the main access point to distance courses.  While cell phones (think basic phones, not smart phones) can certainly be useful to supplement a distance learner’s experiences, reading or writing large documents can be difficult or impossible.  Once BlackBerries or iPhones are more affordable then I can see distance learning in developing countries  relying more heavily on cell phones, but for now I think that traditional methods – email, mail, CMS websites used on a computer – must remain an important part of distance courses.  That being said, I still believe that libraries can capitalize on the widespread use of cell phones, even in developing countries.  For example, sending text messages to alert patrons about library news could be an effective outreach strategy. 

Integrating library services in CMS

As I read through the materials for the “CMS and LMS” unit of this course, one idea that stood out to me was that students have a “preference to stay inside their own domain (for example WebCT). Students are reluctant to leave their course environment even to access important information and their learning is contextual.”  (Lynn Copeland, “There Be Dragons,” p. 203).  This statement was reiterated in the article “Linking Students to Library Resources through the Learning Management System:” “Students are course-centric in their work and library resources need to be presented to them in that context in a convenient place” (466).  As a student, I definitely agree that having everything you need to complete a course in one place is an ideal situation, and was excited to read about the work being done at Ohio State University to integrate library services into the institution’s LMS. 

After reading about the OSU program, I wonder: How many other schools have programs like this? How much money/resources did it really take for OSU to get this program running (the article mentions the use of grant money several times), and how feasible is it for smaller schools to start up a program like this?  Finally, would it be feasible for OSU to somehow package and provide their system to other academic libraries/IT departments, hopefully for less money that it would take for other schools to start from scratch? 

Week Four & Five Reflection

The concept that has stuck with me most as I have completed various readings over the last few weeks is from S. Thompson’s chapter “Teaching in  a Virtual Setting” from Virtual Worlds: Real Libraries.  It is Thompson’s insistence that online educational platforms are “less likely to trigger social anxiety than ... face-to-face communication” (168) that has troubled me since I read this article a week and a half ago.  Thompson mentions this advantage to online education several times in her article, yet I find that social/communication anxiety has been the major inhibitor of my experiences in online courses currently and in the past.  I feel much more nervous and self-conscious about having people read my writing than I do about speaking in class and this often stops me from writing as much as I could to participate in online discussions. 

As I continue with this week’s readings, I find myself wondering about the level of academic librarians’ presence in their institution’s course management systems.  In our library scan assignment we were unable to examine this part of a librarian’s role in distance learning as CMS sites almost always require a username and password provided only to students and faculty.  It would be interesting to be able to compare and contrast librarians’ presence in different institutions’ CMS – for example, seeing whether they use the “micro” or “macro” method of integration as described in Elizabeth L. Black’s article “Toolkit Approach to Integrating Library Resources into the Learning Management System” (497). 

Week Three Reflection

This week I had my first SL interaction outside the FIMS space which really helped me understand how SL can be a useful platform for educational experiences.  On Thursday evening I attended the “Nancy Drew and her Legacy” event at Mystery Manor.  I started out having some technical difficulties – the discussion leader said she was using Voice, so I thought we would all be using our microphones to talk to each other. I turned on my mic and it apparently made some really awful noises!  It turns out that the discussion was actually going to be set up so that just the leader used her mic.  We could all hear her, and the rest of the group members would type to each other.  The discussion leader read what we wrote and would comment and participate in the discussion out loud.  This was a really effective way running the event, as everyone could state their opinions without having to worry about interrupting anyone else. 

The discussion leader read an excerpt from the first Nancy Drew novel as well as an essay from a collection from the Nancy Drew Convention held in the ‘90s at the University of Iowa (the alma mater of Nancy Drew’s original author).  We discussed other female sleuths, and the contributions Nancy made to us as readers and today’s mystery novel scene.  It was a great learning experience and pretty fun, too!

Week Two Reflection

The following is a reflection on the first two chapters of Sharon Almquist’s Distributed Learning and Virtual Librarianship, especially chapter two which discusses emerging trends in distributed learning and virtual librarianship.  I was especially interested in the discussion of the possibility of embedding librarians into online courses, as I recently completed a related project for my Academic Libraries class.  As a group member, I helped design a proposal for embedding information literacy librarians into online courses delivered via a course management system such as WebCT.  Although feasible, such a project would involve a lot of time to be diverted from librarians’ pre-existing commitments and may not be possible in smaller libraries where librarians are more thinly spread.  Our proposal also relied fairly heavily on the fictional library’s pre-existing information literacy resources and faculty-librarian relationships.  (If anyone is interested in seeing this proposal please let me know.  I tried to find the shared online version but one of my group members has removed it.)

This makes me wonder about libraries’ commitment to distance education.  Would all academic libraries, or public libraries in the same city as academic institutions, be willing to go out of their way to promote and improve their distance education initiatives?  The history of distance education presented by Almquist makes it seem as though distance/distributed/continuing education is a high priority for all libraries, but I am looking forward to doing the library scan assignment to see if this truly is the case. 

While exploring distance education in the Canadian context, I was surprised to see that the CLA Guidelines for Library Support of Distance and Distributed Learning in Canada haven’t been updated since 2000, especially considering vast and rapid changes that have occurred in distance education that have occurred in the last decade.  I feel these changes are better reflected in the ACRL Standards for Distance Learning Library Standards of 2008.  For example, the discussion of possible online facilities seems particularly skimpy in the CLA Guidelines.  Again, this makes me wonder about Canadian libraries' commitment to distance education.  

Week One Reflection

As I read through the course syllabus, I found myself thinking that virtual worlds like Second Life (SL) and what I consider “traditional” online teaching platforms such as WebCT don’t have much in common.   However, after reading Stefanie Bucks’s article and the first chapter of Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life and exploring SL and the designer side of WebCT, I realize that they actually have many similarities.  Both are contained online environments that allow users/residents to build the world around them and interact with people that may be sitting in the same computer lab or logging in from a different continent.  Though they look different, both are a kind of virtual world that provide platforms for education. 

I wholeheartedly agree with Stefanie Buck when she writes on the value of becoming a distance education learner to broaden one’s horizons as a distance educator.  I am looking forward to immersing myself in the world of online distance education in order to (hopefully!) become an effective online and distance educator as I enter the librarian profession.  I also look forward to further exploring the similarities and differences between various online educational platforms, and finding out which ones appeal to me and why.  Hopefully this will provide not only useful technical practice as I enter the profession, but will also allow for some constructive personal reflection.  

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Works referenced in this post:

Buck, Stephanie. "A Distance Education Librarian becomes a Distance Education Student: Switching Roles." College & Research News 72.1 (2011) 34-35.

Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life. Princeton University Press: 2008.

Another term, another blog

Blog posts from here on in will be in regards to a course I'm taking this term: LIS 9751 Issues in Distance Learning for Academic and Public Libraries.  Previous posts were written for the Young Adult Materials course I took in the Winter 2011 term.  Feel free to peruse if you wish, though there's nothing too insightful or interesting down there!