Is there someone within your department who assists with setting up e-learning course shells? Librarians can meet with this person periodically to share new library resources and provide instruction in how to embed resources such as e-books or streaming media into your e-learning sites.
Our Education Liaison Librarian regularly meets with the Education Department's administrative assistant to go over accessing and using new library e-resources. For example: linking to, and using, a specific title or chapter that faculty member wants students to read before class from the ASCD collection in Gale eBooks.
The Simmons School of Nursing and Health Sciences requires all students to complete an orientation that introduces them to learning in an online environment.
The Library supports the Instructional Technologist who develops and teaches the orientation by creating online Library tutorials. These include locating resources, searching for and evaluating different types of information, and using information ethically. The orientation also includes a hands-on component at the end for students to practice their new information literacy skills.
During the January 2012 intersession, 37 sophomores were divided into nine teams and presented with the following world challenge: in two weeks, develop a creative and actionable solution to empower women living at the edge of poverty to change their lives and their world.
They were expected to educate themselves on their specific project areas, a process that encompassed understanding their information needs, discovering the resources that contained what they needed and learning how to use and evaluate those resources.
As librarians, our challenges included how best to collaborate, both digitally and face-to-face, with an interdisciplinary group of students and faculty to provide point-of-need research support and guidance to nine different groups that had two weeks to determine their project goals, gain an in-depth understanding of their topics and produce unique yet practical solutions.
