The dividing line…

I started to respond to Lauren’s post on teaching technologies and her question of “Where is the dividing line between distance and traditional learning?” My response got so long, though, I thought I’d add it up here to see about continuing this conversation.

I don’t think there is much of a difference anymore. In my experiences, the main differences came from the library itself–my last job would let me ship materials to distance students, but not “local” ones, and when my position was created that meant that the students had a name–a personal connection to someone in the library who could help. That turned out to often mean I would be helping them with things beyond just the library, i.e., letting them know who to reach for other university needs. But is that really outside our “domain”? Do we stop just at library topics? I think, in some ways, I became an ambassador of sorts for the university as a whole, someone they felt they could just pick up the phone or send an IM/e-mail and get help.

Of course, the other main difference is with those students who study at off-campus locations, or in a distance program that never meets on campus. They often, in my experience, felt disconnected from the university and unaware of the amount of support they could get. Often, I found that until I did an on-site visit with them at their location (when possible), they didn’t really work with any thought to the library or the university. After that, though, I’d hear from them regularly.

I found that it was key to get the faculty aware of our support to be able to share that early on, particularly for those times I wouldn’t be able to meet students in person. I had several departments who invited me to come and present on our services at orientations for online programs that began with a one-week stay on campus before the program began. And others who made sure to include my contact info in their online courses, often referring their students to me.

Probably one of the biggest issues, though, was that after I began, many of our library staff stopped helping distance students and would just refer them to me. So even if the divide is getting blurred, at least for our users, do our non-distance-librarian colleagues feel that same way? Or by naming it, do we become more divisive with our support?

youtube tutorials

I posted the other day about my new position.  I’m still developing the modular tutorial project I mentioned in that post, but the first little bit is now in place.  In the past few days I’ve posted a number of really short screencasts to a YouTube account.  The idea is that they’re really short (under 3 minutes), casual and consistent in appearance, and reusable in a number of ways.  Hopefully this will make them more attractive to students and faculty who might like to use them in their classes.  One of the most important aspects, from my perspective as creator, is that they are so easy and fast to make that there’s no barrier to recreation when a site or database changes.  Is anyone else doing this?  Are you targeting local or distance students?

New Sloan-C Report on Distance Education

The Sloan Consortium released a new report this month by I. Elaine Allen, Ph.D. and Jeff Seaman, Ph.D. on distance education.   The report is named Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning, and is the fifth annual report on the state of online learning in U.S. higher education, based on responses from over 2,500 colleges and universities.  If you’d like to read the report, the PDF is here.

teaching technologies

Once I received my MLIS, I was promoted at my library.  My new job title is “Instructional Design Librarian.”  Right now we are still evolving this position, but largely the focus appears to be finding new technologies and creating plans and pilots where we can integrate these technologies into our services and workflow.  So, I’m working on developing a number of blogs (subject specific, announcing good resources, screencast instruction, etc), a modular tutorials project (which is still evolving, but I’ll let you know more once we have it figured out), and even creating little thinks like a twitter feed of interesting facts.

In the context of this blog and interest group, this work is interesting to me because we’re a very traditional liberal arts campus.   Most of our students between 18 and 22.  Most live on campus.  There’s no entirely online course that I know of.  Some professors use Blackboard, but there isn’t the widespread use of technology that you see at some of the larger technical schools.  Yet, we know students like to learn things at the point in time when they need them.  We realize students like to be able to have quick access to the information they are interested in following.  We know that our students spend a lot of time on their computers.

So while we’re not a campus with any kind of emphasis on “distance learning,” I’m playing with using the tools of distance learning librarians to help our on-campus population.  Where is the dividing line between distance and traditional learning?  Is there a line anymore?  Do you all have examples of this type of situation from your own place of work?

Distance Learning and 2.0

I was just reading the Annoyed Librarian blog and thought the comments regarding a possible connect between 2.0 and distance learning were interesting–it almost argues the opposite of my previous post about our upcoming ALA program that questions whether there is a difference between distance learning and traditional librarianship (or perhaps, more accurately–in my mind, at least–whether there should be).

What do you think? Do you think the two are tied together? Do you find that 2.0 technologies/practices help make for effective distance learning services and instruction?

Pencil us in for ALA Midwinter

Hi everyone,

After so many mix-ups with the last ALA meeting, I want to be sure to get on your calendars early for ALA Midwinter 2008. We’ve asked to have space for the Distance Learning Interest Group would to meet Saturday, January 12th, from 10:30 am to 12 noon.

This isn’t confirmed yet, so use pencil! I’ll update when you should upgrade to ink

DLIG to have Program at ALA Annual

Good news! The Distance Learning Interest Group has been trying for a few years to get enough momentum to have a program at ALA Annual (Anaheim, CA, June 26-July 2, 2008). I’m happy to say that Lauren and I proposed a topic and it has been approved! The topic came from our last in-person meeting, where there was much discussion (in part spurred on by past chair, Howard Carter–thanks, Howie) about whether, with distance learning evolving and becoming ever more ubiquitous, distance learning is really distinct from on-site library and information services. To sum up: isn’t all learning now, to some extent, distance learning?

With that in mind, then the program is titled “If we don’t call it distance learning, does it exist?” and the description is:

In our world of online access to resources and services, aren’t all users distance learners? Should all library staff have engage with distance learning?

We will look at these questions in three ways: impact on the library’s mission and culture; how outreach is affected; and challenges for solo distance-learning librarians. Discussion will engage the audience to identify ways to integrate distance learning services and resources with traditional support and physical collections.

Let’s get this discussion started early. What do you think?

ALA Recap

We officially posted a summary of our meeting on the LITA Blog, but we wanted to update you here, too.

This Annual Meeting was a bit complicated for our group.  There was a room mix up before we got to Washington so we weren’t in the program, we were assigned a room, but another group was on the scheduled board outside it so they were meeting there, we weren’t sure we would have a room, but the hotel was kind enough to find us another spot to meet.  When all was said and done, we were a small group of three.  We were disappointed we weren’t able to meet with the regular Distance Learning Interest Group folks, but the small group did allow for more detailed discussion about specifics at our institutions.

We also determined that if any group could deal with such in-person scheduling conflicts, it should be the distance learning folks!  We are used to communicating across space and asynchronously, it’s our job after all.   So we set up to talk about ways to make this interest group more vital throughout the year.

Our first step is this blog.  Here we hope to provide a space for community discussion and a place where people can share success stories or tips. We decided that some good topics to begin with include copyright law and licensing, case studies, screen casts of things that work, and materials that distance learning librarians can share among themselves.

We also talked about trying to put together an online distance learning interest group meeting so that we can get together the 25-30 people who typically would come to our discussion group.  If any of you have interest in something like this, please leave a note in the comments or email us.

Finally, we discussed programming options and submitted a proposal.  We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything.

So, over the next few weeks we’ll be posting general topics here (in the same manner that we bring up general topics of discussion for the group) and would love to have discussions in the comments.  If you see a better way to facilitate discussion on the blog, please let us know.  We really want this to be something that is useful for everyone.

ALA Meeting Agenda

We have a rough agenda — talking points, really — for the LITA Distance Learning Interest Group (DLIG) meeting at ALA Annual (Saturday, June 23rd, 10:30 a.m. – 12 noon / Renaissance Washington – Room 2)

1. Introduction to DLIG & update
   • New cochair
   • Blog
   • Technical Services Quarterly (Barry Baker’s column)
2. How to make DLIG more beneficial & ideas on how to coordinate with other DL groups
3. July deadline for 2008 LITA Forum – ideas, volunteers
4. Distance Learning open discussion:
   • 2.0 technologies
   • Outreach — what works, what doesn’t
   • Are we making users go through the library for help, or are we giving them tools to work on their own and/or meet them where they are?
   • True tales: successes/problems

We hope you are able to join us, but if you couldn’t make it, feel free to add your own thoughts here! We’ll be posting minutes following the meeting, as well.

Share your ideas & stories!

We’d love to hear from you. Do you have ideas on how the Distance Learning Interest Group can work better for you? Have you had a recent distance learning success, or even a failure or challenge you are still trying to address? Or are you part of a distance learning group we can coordinate with?

Let us know. We’d be happy to add your thoughts to this community blog.