Distant Learners and the Library

At the same time that online education has expanded, academic libraries have been adding more and more electronic materials. It might be logical to expect that online programs would have integrated library resources fully into their offerings, but that hasn’t always happened. Students who enroll in online courses often have very little experience in using an electronic library (or any library at all). The staff responsible for overseeing the programs and course software may be administratively and psychologically far removed from the library staff. Librarians may not have considered how services might be changed to meet the needs of distant users. Faculty may be unsure of copyright requirements and may choose not to use library materials to which they have full rights.

Student Issues

Students enroll in distance learning classes or programs for many reasons. They may be already in a traditional program, taking one or more online courses to balance a tight schedule; they may be working full time, squeezing time out of busy lives; they may be located far away from a degree-granting institution. According to a study done by Noel-Levitz, 79 percent of online learners are over the traditional college ages of 18-24; 70 percent are working fulltime; and the top factors in their decisions to enroll are convenience and their work schedules.

The courses themselves may differ. A program may be entirely online, with each student working individually. There may be virtual chat sessions, in which students are involved in discussions with each other. The course may be a “hybrid” one, with some classes online and others face-to-face on campus. Or classes may meet occasionally at locations remote from the school.

Consider one hypothetical student, Cathy, an ambitious single mother who works during the day and fits her college work around her three-year-old’s sleeping schedule. While the university where she is enrolled in a distance program is only two miles from her home, Cathy finds that each trip to campus cuts into her time with her daughter, her study time, or her work. She appreciates being able to purchase textbooks online, and last semester purchased two books from Amazon she needed for her research rather than make a trip to check them out of the library. She has never visited the physical library, although for one course her instructor told the class to read an article from an electronic journal. She tried, late at night, but was unsuccessful and did not try again. Instead, she found information on the topic through Google.

Another hypothetical student, John, lives in a rural area 300 miles from the institution where he is completing his undergraduate degree after a thirty-year hiatus. While most of his sessions are online, once a month he travels fifty miles to a high school where he meets for several hours with the others enrolled in his course. He hopes he can actually see his soon-to-be alma mater by coming to his graduation. While he has good computer skills—he uses a computer daily in his job—he has not used a library since his first college days.

Both these imaginary students have issues in common. They are both adults, with limited time to visit a physical library. While each has proficient computer skills, neither has experience with an electronic library. Their instructors have provided no information or instruction, and their respective libraries have made no attempt to reach out to them.

All college students need to be able to locate, evaluate, and use information in a legal and ethical manner, and at most institutions librarians are involved in teaching and promoting information literacy. Distant learners need formal programs in information literacy perhaps even more than do on-campus students. These learners are not likely to see promotional materials and displays in the library, nor will they be privy to knowledge from fellow students. Given their age, distant students probably did not learn in previous schooling the skills needed to search a database effectively or how to sort through the incredible amount of information a simple Google question returns.

Libraries have developed many ways to reach off-campus students. The University of Texas has made its TILT (Texas Information Literacy Tutorial) available as open source for other libraries to adapt for its own use, and many have. Using various kinds of specialized software, librarians offer online “Ask-A-Librarian” services that allow users to submit a question online. Some software allows for chat and the ability to demonstrate websites to students wherever they might be.

Many larger libraries have a designated a “distance learning librarian” or office, some of which have been in existence for a long time. But as online courses have displaced the former “extension courses,” libraries have not often developed the same kinds of working relationships they have with on-campus faculty and their courses. The reason for this may be the administrative distance between the library and the local distance education staff who build and maintain courses.

On many campuses, the office that oversees distance learning may be both administratively and geographically far from the library. Those responsible for promoting online courses, recruiting instructors, and creating or helping to develop the courses may not be aware of the library as a potential partner. On one campus, the instructional designer responsible for an online MBA program provided links to Findarticles.com (free articles available on the Internet) for each course, but never thought at all about including links to the library’s expensive purchased databases.

Adjunct faculty are always difficult to reach, even when they are teaching on campus. When they may be teaching from anywhere in the world, the difficulty increases.

Obviously the library and the distance learning office need to communicate with each other in order to make sure that course designers, faculty, and students are aware of what the library has to offer. Here are some suggested steps:

· There should be a link on the default template of the course management software to the library’s electronic resources page so faculty and students in each course can connect directly to the library without leaving the course shell; the distance education page should highlight links to the library and its services.

· If not already in place, one librarian should be designated as the contact person for distance programs; this person should be proactive in working with the distance education office and with faculty and students.

· The librarian should be provided with a way to reach all faculty teaching in the program—perhaps by being able to send a message to a listserv or distribution list, or by being provided with a list of email addresses.

· Each semester the librarian should contact all faculty with a reminder of what resources and services are available.

· Librarians should develop a web page especially for distance students that outlines how they can use the library and what help is available; many good examples already exist.

· Course designers and the designated librarian should meet on a regular basis, with the librarian willing to write content that pertains to the location and evaluation of information.

· The library collections and services should be evaluated as part of any assessment carried on by the distance education office.

Not just information literacy programs, but all library services should be examined to assure that they meet the needs of distant learners who sometimes cannot make use of services originally developed for on-campus users. As an example of what can happen, one institution offered a master’s degree to students who came from five states for an intensive weekend once a month. To complete their master’s papers, enrollees often needed materials not owned by the library. Interlibrary loan was provided at no cost, but the ILL office had a requirement that loans were to be picked up in person. So that the students would not have to wait until their monthly class, the department offering the program, upon notification from the student, retrieved the loan, wrapped it, and mailed it out, thus replicating some of the work and adding days onto the process.

Even when the library doesn’t make it harder, users are seldom happy with interlibrary loan turnaround times. Libraries serving distant learners should be willing to fax articles or adopt the web-access option available through Ariel, an Internet-transmission system used by many academic libraries. They should also be willing to mail or fax books and copies of articles from their print collections, rather than expecting users to make hundred-mile or more trips to the library. Some libraries charge for this service; others see it as a cost of providing library services, just as they absorb the cost of circulating and shelving books at their campus location.

If distant students meet at another location, librarians should consider meeting with them to establish a personal contact. Not only will the students learn about library services or specialized databases, but also the visiting librarian will learn about student needs.

Finally, as part of its own assessment exercises, the library should make efforts to determine what distant learners are like, what their needs are, and whether library services meet their needs.

On many campuses, librarians take an active role in helping to understand and apply the “fair use” provisions of the copyright law. They find that faculty members tend to fall into two distinct groups regarding copyright: those who feel that since what they may copy is for educational use they may copy whatever they want; and those who are so concerned about copyright they think they cannot copy anything without permission or payment. Neither group is right.

In an online course, students may be expected to buy a textbook as they might for any class. Other materials, though, must be made available electronically if they are to be useful. For many materials that might be included in an online course, the answer is simple: the institution’s library may already have an electronic subscription. If this is so, and the license provides for remote access, then the college has already paid (and sometimes paid quite a bit) for all its students to access the article.

While the 1976 Copyright Act was enacted before the Internet, the TEACH Act (Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization Act) codifies the use of copyrighted materials in online education. The TEACH Act has fairly rigid requirements, but using a course management system such as Blackboard or WebCT meets many of the requirements for digitizing copyrighted materials:

The number of online students continues to increase and must also serve those students whose only contact with the campus may be electronic. Good service will only happen when distance education offices and libraries work together and libraries recognize that their traditional offerings may present barriers to distant students.

While this article has concerned itself with colleges and universities with a physical campus, a recent phenomenon has been the growth of institutions, most of them proprietary, that exist only online. It is these institutions that have been growing most rapidly. From the beginning, accrediting agencies have insisted that online colleges provide libraries. Some of these colleges have met the challenge very well and others not so well. In the accompanying sidebar (see back page) is an analysis of the factors involved in creating excellent online libraries. Those in academia for whom distance education is an add-on should see what they could learn from their successful competitors. – Mignon Adams, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia

Crews, Kenneth D. New Copyright Law for Distance Education: The Meaning and Importance of the TEACH Act American Library Association Washington Office, 2006.

Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005. Sloan Corporation, 2005. (Downloadable from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/index.asp )

The third annual report on the state of online education in U.S. Higher Education. Supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and based on responses from over 1,000 colleges and universities.

Guidelines for Distance Learning Library Services. Association of College and Research Libraries, 2004.

National Online Learners Priorities Report. 2005 Research Report. Noel-Levitz, 2005. Downloadable from: https://www.noellevitz.com/Papers+and+Research/Research/ResearchLibrary/Satisfaction+and
+priorities+reports.htm

TEACH Act Best Practices using Blackboard™. American Library Association Washington Office, 2006.

TILT Tutorial. University of Texas at Austin. Information available at: http://tilt.lib.utsystem.edu/resources/index.html