Education for Information

This case study describes several courses that resulted from a teaching partnership between an instructional technologist/professor and a librarian that evolved over several semesters, and the information literacy implications of the course formats. In order to increase student engagement, active learning and inquiry-based learning techniques were incorporated into the courses. By designing the courses in this manner, information literacy was addressed in various ways throughout the courses. This paper will provide some background on the instructors' approach and inspirations, discuss some specifics of the courses, and relate the information literacy outcomes.

Traditionally, a large lecture hall course follows a teacher-centered approach to instruction. This was the case for the ``gateway'' course in the undergraduate Information Technology and Informatics (ITI) major in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. This paper describes the journey and collaboration between the course instructor and the instructional design/technology specialist to transform a large lecture hall course (with up to 450 students) into an active, collaborative learning experience - one that engages students in learning, emphasizes higher-order thinking skills, and creates a sense of community that can be lacking in such a format. This transformation was realized when the boundaries of the classroom extended into the ``online'' environment.

This conceptual paper will discuss how faculty from The School of Library and Information Science at The University of South Carolina partnered with their university's Center for Teaching Excellence. This partnership resulted in the facilitation of professional development workshops and online tools for peer educators to better serve distance education/online students who are differently-able (students who are medically or socially labeled as having disabilities). National-level online instruction standards, instructional techniques, as well as outcomes and future plans will be discussed.

This paper discusses the intentions and outcomes of a service-learning course in LIS. Interviews with students who had recently completed the course provided insight into how the course had changed their perspective on their community. The interviews sought students' perspectives on their own empathetic development, sense of community, and impediments in completing the course. The students reported increased knowledge and understanding of the people who live in their community during the course of the semester. Traditional students, though, experienced fewer problems completing the coursework than non-traditional students, which should be considered when implementing service-learning courses at the graduate level.

While instructors know the importance of successful small group collaboration, and the value of the skills required to execute them, students continue to prefer to work independently. The promise and development of recent online tools, however, and streams of recent research on small group collaboration, continue to produce less-than-satisfying or sufficiently generalizable pedagogical interventions. This study examines a more systematic attempt to direct students through specific tasks designed to improve their experience and produce higher quality student learning outcomes. Two groups of graduate students across four required online classes were surveyed about their attitudes and the steps they take when engaging assigned small group projects. The first group was offered a pre-recorded lecture as a resource while the second group was offered the same lecture plus additional specific ground rules to help avoid common negative experiences. Both groups were asked to complete surveys about their experiences. While many students continue to exhibit less-than-productive behaviors and practices, even after engaging the guidelines, some improvements did emerge. The study points out that more attention to pedagogical intervention is indicated if instructors hope to improve learning outcomes in valuable small group collaborations.

We propose digital storytelling as a pedagogical tool for online Library and Information Science education that recognizes diversity and fosters reflection among students and teacher. In a course titled Documenting Diverse Cultures and Communities, students contemplated their role as future information professionals and produced a short digital story dealing with community, archives, and history. We use a call-and-response dialogue on storytelling to discuss how we access personal and social historical memory.

For the Spring 2015 semester of the Public Library Management course, students were given digital badges along with grades for their coursework. For each topic's corresponding assignment, students received a traditional grade and those achieving at least an A- received a digital badge that represented the skill or knowledge demonstrated. By using digital badges, the students were given the opportunity to experience this growing educational trend and reflect on their role in the learning that takes place in libraries for librarians and library users. To explore the effectiveness of digital badging, students were surveyed to ascertain how they perceived the digital badges they received. The survey results indicated that students were underwhelmed by the experience in terms of their own motivation, their perception of the usefulness of badges for employment and for professional development purposes, and their future personal use of badges.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have brought about new questions regarding the construction of virtual learning environments and course delivery systems. One such question that researchers and instructors alike are considering is the role of community in learning spaces. This paper uses a professional development (PD) MOOC as a case study to investigate whether students identified as a community and identify characteristics that encourage students to believe this is so. Furthermore, the authors question if ``community,'' specifically ``communities of practice,'' is actually the appropriate way to describe such learning spaces, or if the concept of affinity spaces is more useful. The findings reveal important implications for designing course spaces for community experiences and the conceptual approach to professional development communities in large-scale courses.