Beginning in 1996 and continuing today, an increasing number of students have taken advantage of online web-based distance learning programs to earn a master's degree in library and information science (LIS). The master's degree in LIS is a required qualification for work in the profession of librarianship, but to date, there has not been research to determine whether graduates of online programs have successful careers (are they finding jobs, staying in the field, are their careers advancing?) or if they are contributing to the LIS profession by active membership in professional organizations, publishing articles in professional journals, or Web-based professional communication (e.g., via listservs, online communities, blogs, and/or wikis). If graduates of online programs are not having careers as successful as those of graduates of on-campus programs, and/or if graduates of online programs are not contributing to the LIS profession as actively as graduates of on-campus programs, then schools of LIS need to consider how to adjust their online education programs to improve the success of their graduates and thereby help maintain the health of the LIS profession. Ten years ago, at the beginning of the large growth of web-based distance learning in LIS, predictions were made about its economic benefits and effects on curriculum (Besser & Bonn, 1996). Web-based distance learning was predicted by some to be a low-cost means to educate more students, while others predicted that web-based learning would require more resources -money, time, and people - to achieve satisfactory learning experiences and outcomes. In reality, both outcomes have been true (the latter greater than the former) but alternative economic models of education, such as multi-institutional consortia, have become more feasible. Faculty, administrators, students, and employers have all been concerned about learning. Would students learn what they needed to learn? How could learning be assessed online? Would students be able to secure jobs - and would their employers be pleased with the results? Recently published research and anecdotes from the field both indicate there is some resistance in the profession to hiring students with online degrees (Epperson & Wilde, 2005; Kim & Kusack, 2005). The graduates of online programs are confident in their abilities and articulate in explaining why, but their satisfaction has not yet been tested longitudinally (Glover, 2005). Finally, online learning has enabled LIS education to reach students - and thus libraries and communities - it has not been able to reach (Kazmer, 2005; Mellon & Kester, 2004). Even with the long and successful history of distance learning in LIS, more opportunity was found in the wired world. Not only can additional students be reached, but additional teacher/practitioners and other valuable types of adjunct instruction (including distant guest speakers) can be included in the educational environment. Potential issues which may emerge at the session include professional contributions and networking, the role of continuing education in connecting the profession to the academy, curriculum content and delivery, and comparing the economic reality with the predictions Graduate LIS programs are responsible (in part) for ensuring their graduates are well-prepared to have successful careers as individuals - no matter what each individual perceives to be his or her own success - and that some percentage of those graduates become leaders in the profession by becoming supervisors, managers, and directors. The graduates expect these outcomes; the profession expect them; and the ongoing health of each LIS program relies on them. As well, the health of the LIS profession as a whole, and in particular the professional organizations that promulgate the profession's role in society and the standards by which it operates (standards that range from ethics to metadata), relies on the contributions of professionals. Thinking about the modes of networking (some of which are highly local) and perceived potential lack of interaction among online students raises worries about those students career paths and professional contributions. How do the career tracks of distance graduates compare with those of on-campus graduates? How can we “best track employers” long-term satisfaction with our distance graduates? How can we ensure the health of the IS profession by making sure distance graduates are contributing through service and professional publication? One way that distance education is affecting curricula long term is through providing means of expansion that are not available in face-to-face settings. One example is the WISE consortium, which gives access to courses that a school cannot make available at the local level. Other examples are courses that are bilaterally shared, with students from two schools working together (although they may still be enrolled in a course offered in the home institution with a local faculty instructor). However, beyond that, distance education may have a long term effect on curricula by broadening the pool of human resources available to teach courses, particularly specialized topics courses for which a school does not have faculty and for which there may not be available adjuncts in the area. A distance course, depending on the technology used, means that faculty can be just as dispersed as the students are, as is clearly demonstrated in LEEP. In addition to tapping expertise in specialized areas from the practitioner pool, distance delivery also provides access to retired faculty who may want to continue some teaching, but do not want to stay in (for example) Norman, or Tuscaloosa, or Tallahassee. For example, at OU, the College of Arts and Sciences is aggressively recruiting faculty who have just retired to continue teaching in the distance learning program. Data related to the use of adjuncts for teaching distance education is available in the ALISE Statistical Report, but there are also issues and problems that dispersion of adjunct and retired faculty might raise. Of course, the potential for dispersed regular faculty is also increased by the use of distance delivery, and that raises other issues/concerns. How will curricula be shaped - including benefits and detriments - by the increased ability to use distributed adjunct instruction? How will curricula be shaped long-term by the ability to offer quality-assured courses across multiple institutions? What will be the effects on the experience of students being taught by a highly distributed faculty? The economics of online education in LIS has been changed by web-based online learning programs, and in particular by some structures enabled by web-based distance learning - e.g., consortiums like WISE. While distance education in a variety of modes has been around for decades, online education is at a point where the cost of delivery is low; at the same time, the software and hardware available to universities and students enable high quality delivery of education. The economics of online education enables consortiums like WISE to be successful; increasing the choices, quality, and opportunities for students and increasing the number of graduates. However, the economics of online education also enables programs like the University of Phoenix to provide education by reaching non-traditional students looking for education and reaching non-traditional faculty looking for the opportunity to teach. In this way, my comments articulate neatly with what June Lester will speak about. My comments will address what the changing economics means for traditional and online education over the next decade. How has the economics of online learning been different from initial predictions? How will additional models of cooperation - such as consortia - affect online and on-campus education over the next decade? What will the next ten years bring in terms of changing populations of students, graduates, and faculty of online and on-campus programs? In many cases LIS schools have been the leaders on their campuses in establishing and developing programs for online education. This presentation will report on a decade of experience with the LEEP online program at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and discuss likely future directions for online LIS education. More than 500 MS students, from most of the 50 states and several foreign countries, have earned their degree through LEEP. They have been taught by both full-time GSLIS faculty and adjuncts from many different locations. Together with Syracuse University, Illinois is now taking a leadership role in the growth of the WISE (Web-based Information Science Education) consortium, an initiative that encompasses an infrastructure for course sharing, pedagogical training, and articulation of quality metrics for online LIS education. What is the scope of courses that can be taught online? Are there topics within curricula that still require face-to-face instruction? How are developments in technology changing the way we teach online? What types of students seek to study online? What career paths do they follow once they complete their degrees? In what ways are they helped or hindered by having pursued their degrees online? What are the challenges and benefits of different universities collaborating in online education? What are the possibilities for professional society and university collaboration in online education in support of professional development? How can research inform practice in online education?
Students entering distance
education programs often find themselves adapting to new learning
environments and new technologies. Examining suggestions from
distance learning students on how to cope with this process yields
three-fold results.
This paper presents findings from a qualitative analysis of electronic journal entries created by elementary school students during field trips to a nature center. The field trips were part of the Habitat Tracker project (http://tracker.cci.fsu.edu/) designed to help elementary students learn about scientific practices. The Habitat Tracker team developed a mobile app and accompanying Web site integrated with a standards-based science curriculum. The mobile app includes observation worksheets and an electronic journal that guide student inquiry activities during the field trip. This study focuses on how the students’ journal entries demonstrate features of scientific journaling; how students engage in scientific practices when journaling; and how including multiple nature observation sites during a field trip shapes students’ journal writing. Our analysis demonstrates that journal entries reveal underlying strengths and weaknesses of students’ progress in scientific inquiry. The analysis indicates persistent effects of scaffolding and how carefully scaffolds’ content and delivery must be designed.
Using the Internet means bringing into our offline lives yet another social world, one in which we operate through media, communicating and maintaining ties with people who live at a distance and who we may rarely or never meet. How successfully do we manage integration of this new world into our existing world? Do worlds collide or seamlessly integrate into a cohesive whole? For 1 year, the authors followed 17 students as they engaged in a distance learning program. The authors explored their involvement with the online learning community and how this affected their relationships with family, work, volunteer, and peer groups. Students' satisfaction with the program increased, and anxiety about operating in the online world decreased, with increased involvement with the learning community. This was realized at the expense of offline communities and activities. However, the authors also found a reverse trend when students reengaged with offline life as they neared the end of their program. This work highlights the importance of temporal aspects of involvement in online worlds and provides some insight into the priorities, needs, and rewards involved with managing multiple worlds.
In 1996 the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign began an Internet-based teaching program, allowing students across the United States - and the world - to earn a Master's degree from a distance. The program, known as Leep (Library Education Experimental Project), has been an outstanding success, and as an early innovation in Internet use, provides important lessons on how to flourish in an online environment. Learning, Culture and Community in Online Education brings together significant new research on online education, using the LEEP program as a model to reveal a wealth of information about innovative online practices. Contributions by administrators, philosophers, faculty, librarians, technical staff, and researchers in the traditions of education, computer science, folklore, information science, and sociology, reveal the many perspectives to be taken into account when creating and maintaining distance learning programs. More than an analysis of the LEEP program, this book is an essential introduction to the variety of social and educational phenomena that occur within the socio-technical environments that support online learners.
To be effective and at the same time sustainable, a community data curation model needs to be aligned with the community's current data practices, including research project activities, data types, and perceptions of data quality. Based on a survey of members of the condensed matter physics ( CMP ) community gathered around the N ational H igh M agnetic F ield L aboratory, a large national laboratory, this article defines a model of CMP research project tasks consisting of 10 task constructs. In addition, the study develops a model of data quality perceptions by CMP scientists consisting of four data quality constructs. The paper also discusses relationships among the data quality perceptions, project roles, and demographic characteristics of CMP scientists. The findings of the study can inform the design of a CMP data curation model that is aligned and harmonized with the community's research work structure and data practices.
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The production of scientific knowledge has evolved from a process of inquiry largely based on the activities of individual scientists to one grounded in the collaborative efforts of specialized research teams. This shift brings to light a new question: how the composition of scientific teams affects their production of knowledge. This study employs data from 1,415 experiments conducted at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) between 2005 and 2008 to identify and select a sample of 89 teams and examine whether team diversity and network characteristics affect productivity. The study examines how the diversity of science teams along several variables affects overall team productivity. Results indicate several diversity measures associated with network position and team productivity. Teams with mixed institutional associations were more central to the overall network compared with teams that primarily comprised NHMFL's own scientists. Team cohesion was positively related to productivity. The study indicates that high productivity in teams is associated with high disciplinary diversity and low seniority diversity of team membership. Finally, an increase in the share of senior members negatively affects productivity, and teams with members in central structural positions perform better than other teams.
This paper examines two IMLS-funded scholarship programs that targeted non-traditional LIS students, documenting non-academic aspects of the programs that participating students identified as most important to the successful completion of their academic programs and to their establishment as contributing members of the professional library community. Formative analyses conducted during the programs pointed to the importance of ongoing and extensive administrative and emotional support for participants, and this paper provides an analysis of the value of these intangible sources of student support. Using online surveys and semi-structured interviews of selected participants from both scholarship programs, this study found that multiple forms of intangible support, from multiple sources inside and outside the academy, that surpassed institutional norms, were crucial to the academic and early career success of non-traditional LIS students.Keywords: student support; non-traditional students; distance learning; intangible support; survey and interview methodsIntroductionFor the future of the LIS professions and the success of individuals, it is crucial that LIS students begin to build their professional networks during their academic LIS programs (Kazmer, 2006). The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarians program has been instrumental in funding the education of the next generation of LIS professionals. Many of the scholarship projects funded through this program have been designed to recruit and prepare librarians to serve underserved or at-risk populations. These projects often include activities intended to socialize scholarship recipients - many of whom are from backgrounds that lead to their being considered non-traditional students - into their professional communities and provide them with administrative and logistical support.To determine which aspects of LIS students' educational programs have been most effective, it is important to look beyond the scholarship funding periods and follow the graduates as they begin their professional careers. Are IMLS-funded graduates benefitting from the educational initiatives in which they participated? Did the additional administrative support made possible by grant funding factor into their success? Are graduates connecting with the people and institutions that will help them become effective library leaders? Do their professional networks include their classmates? This study addresses these questions by documenting the intangible factors recent graduates of two online IMLS-funded scholarship programs targeting non-traditional students at Florida State University identified as being instrumental to their academic and early career success.BackgroundResearch about the non-financial support of graduate students has tended to focus on support for learning (Shepherd & Bolliger, 201 1), often within individual courses (Lee, Srinivasan, Trail, Lewis, & Lopez, 201 1). Other research in the area of support has focused on how librarians can support students in a wide variety of educational settings and for varying purposes, including higher education (Mortimore & Wall, 2009; Stoffle & Cuillier, 2010) and K-12 schools (Farmer, 2009). Research about the support needed by online LIS students began soon after the first wave of LIS programs moved to web-based platforms in the mid-1990s (e.g., Hara & Kling, 2000; Kazmer, 2000), and continues to be an area of study as e-learning becomes more common and the technologies used for it change rapidly (Hank, Sugimoto, & Pomerantz, 2012; Mon, 2012).Master's students in LIS are frequently in need of support beyond that offered at the level of the course (i.e., dedicated toward learning); they need support at the program and professional preparation level (Cherry, Duff, Singh, & Freund, 201 1). This is especially true for distance students who may encounter more roadblocks in accessing traditional means of support (Lee, 2010). …
