Distance Learning and the Digital Library

Posted on April 2, 2008 by Art Clifford

Google Thmumbnail, Sony eReader One of the many good things about distance learning is how much time and money students can save using online reading materials. E-books, e-reserves, and e-periodicals form a perfect trio. Students save cash, but the biggest saving can be time. A student in Jakarta, Indonesia or Bagram AFB, Afghanistan can’t walk to a bookstore. Also, such locations can (and have) taken up to three weeks for Amazon to ship books. Such a time frame is not helpful if you’re taking a three week course.

The benefits don’t stop there. The experience gained from using the 21st century library assures students will become familiar with the information economy. Once students get a taste of accessing full text of seminal articles and creating “mashups” from data bases, they transform into new-generation thinkers.

Students also gain immediate access to venerable “course packets” now available through e-reserve and online media, can be highlighted and written on (from PDF files that can be highlighted and marked up).

But a book can be held, shelved, and admired for years. Right? The truth is that textbooks are quickly out of date and carrying them around can contribute to hernias and backaches.

Truth be told, I was slow to embrace e-books and periodicals when I first taught a distance learning course back in 2001. I like print on paper and after all, how many students had laptops? And who could imagine wireless connections? Reading an e-book meant sitting at heavy desktop computer.

Still, I wanted to introduce students to the idea of e-books. About this time, I learned of “Project Bartleby,” a project at Columbia University that was digitizing thousands of books. Students could now look up quotes in Bartlett’s, definitions from the Columbia Encyclopedia or access a thesaurus. How about a quick peek at the Elements of Style by Will Strunk? The wizards at Columbia had collected editions out of copyright and made them available to the world. Project Bartleby has grown, and it’s became a business spin-off at http://www.bartleby.com

It’s 2008, and the age of e-books is finally here. Fancy e-readers (book-like devices that can store hundreds of books) from Sony and Amazon are now available for e-reading. We are finally free of the computer.

Distance learning students have been among the first to realize what a treasure they can access. A UMass email account is the key to the electronic library — 24/7.

Library staff have been racing to keep up with the new format. Periodicals, for instance, are almost all purchased online. Digitized science journals were among the first to become popular. Why? Because they are easily searchable. Newspapers have followed and students – on campus or off, are becoming accustomed to the instant gratification of digital media.

New online services such as NetLibrary.com have sprung up and offer libraries the chance to buy access to thousands of e books at one time. My students are frequently assigned books exclusively from services such as NetLibrary. One result is they save several hundred textbook dollars.

What’s the future of e books? Some say it’s limited, but others see it as a way to publish and distribute material using e-paper. I have a Sony e-reader and it has 100 books on it. It weighs 9 ounces. Its use of e-paper is excellent (but only monochromatic). New books can be purchased online for roughly half the price of traditional paper. Amazon has an e-reader, too. It offers access to a growing collection of books on Amazon. It also offers subscriptions to the New York Times. It’s a business model that is quickly evolving.

Most exciting is the way publishers are embracing e-books. E.g., last year I found an e-version of a text book used by some of my students. It was $40. The paper version is $85. Need I say more?

Reason #10 to Encourage Distance Learning Students to Use a Digital Library: The 21st-Century Workforce

Recently, a new hire at a friend’s company was assigned the task to review, analyze, and write a report about several organizations the company was interested in working with. This colleague describes the result: “My employee received a poor narrative, just a long summary, and it wasn’t comprehensive.” The employee didn’t use any initiative, didn’t go beyond the superficial. The employee was unprepared for the job.

These days, a lot of employers are facing similar situations; they feel that today’s graduates’ of universities are deficient in “applied skills” such as critical thinking, written communications, and finding reliable information. The Partnership for 21st-Century Skills found as much in a 2006 study, “Are They Really Ready to Work?” The study identifies which skills students lack and how important those skills are today and in the near future. People like Andrea Brands are working with educators around the country to help provide those skills to students.

Note: Art Clifford invites comments and questions on the use of ebooks and periodicals in teaching online. Feel free to comment here.

[image source: http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:qc0hhctnrFgJ:http://www.pdatoday.com/images/uploads/sony_ereader.jpg]

Comments

8 Responses to “Distance Learning and the Digital Library”

John Callahan on April 13th, 2008 10:53 am

Great to see some appreciative words about a digital library.

As a librarian at UMass Lowell, I have lived through the great transformation from a traditional book and journal library to the new online version. If I can fine tune Art Clifford’s entry, let me start by saying that Lowell, like other UMass campuses, have aggressively acquired access to electronic formats as funds allowed. And our librarians have relentlessly promoted the use of these resources to students and faculty. Far from being the ‘end of the library’ it has been the beginning of something new and exciting to us all.

But let’s be clear - the frontier with ebooks is still wild and wooley. We are delivering reference books and books which are out of print. But there is so much that remains out of reach yet. Lowell never attempted to acquire paper versions of text books for the reasons Art Clifford laid out - these texts change too often and are ancillary to the classroom. The real frontier is to legally acquire current monographic materials - that is, books that are written in all fields which are meant to be read in large parts or as a whole. These are fiction and non-fiction texts which should be in the electronic stacks. We are still looking for the solution to this format and watch developments from Google, Open Access Initiative, and elsewhere.

Secondly, the attention at Amazon and Microsoft is in finding a separate reader for content. This focus on a device that is ‘the one that works’ feeds in to the ongoing dialog about the arrival of personal computing devices for students. Laptops, tablets, PDAs, UMPCs, smartphones (including the revolution of the iPhone) all are competitors in the field and complicate what libraries can provide. The jury is still out on what really works for academics.

Finally, the burden librarians are wrestling with every day is trying hard to promote the resources we have acquired to students. Too often we fear that our users are not aware of what we can offer to them. We sit between various database providers who control the content and interface and our faculty and students who are trying to learn how to find what they need, often in very tight circumstances of time and focus.

A last word on what was going to be a short entry about Faculty and students - the most successful ones know who their librarian subject specialist is and make frequent use of their talents. These librarians can be your best friends in navigating the electronic ’stacks’ of the online library.

Thanks for reading!
Art Clifford on April 14th, 2008 3:49 pm

John,

Thanks for adding those important items to my commentary. I’m sorry that I ignored librarian subject specialists. In my case it is humanities bibliographer Jim Kelly. Jim’s a librarian/scholar, and he manages to stay current in so many online topics. He’s amazing. I can’t say enough good things about our librarians in general and Jim in particular.
Art Clifford
John Callahan on April 20th, 2008 10:36 am

Art
What Librarians need to know from faculty and students is what remains to be done to help them be successful in their work. As the keeper of the proxy server for many years, I know first hand the problems distant learners wrestle with in trying to use the library. Some faculty deliver the whole contect to their learning system and others do little more than point at the library and say ‘go seek’ - just like the old days when we were in college. What I caught were people with no idea where to start, technical problems with their home PC, weird problems with their login accounts, and basically a desperate need to have something right now to let them do their work tonight! All pretty normal for libraries offering remote access.

While we all try to meeet the needs our distant learners, it seems that it would do the UMass system well to do as other schools have done to create a distant learner librarian position or at least recognize someone as doing this special task.

A DL librarian could be a team or an individual contact but in either case to offer a ‘go to’ person that any online student or faculty person could go to would help connect the student to these distant libraries.

The position could rotate through the librarians and it could be assigned to some one who has the talents for dealing with this kind of support but it should be recognized and supported by the institution. It could mean unusual hours for online support and some extra equipment such as a scanner and fax machine handy to their own office and some travel and recognition such as title and such. Of course, more business cards would complete the picture!

The payoff would be to have an advocate and a knowledgeable person about the special problems distant learners are having. Right now, I believe we are diluting this knowledge among our staff and not getting the complete picture of what is working, what is not, what we could do better.

As the proxy server contact I heard all sorts of questions and tried as much as I could to solve their problems. Sometimes it worked 1-2-3 and sometimes I would email or fax the specific articles that the person needed to them. For some people who just could not get their PC to get to the library, it gave them what they needed when they needed it. Then we could work out their problems without the pressure of homework deadlines. Seems to have worked. And I always invited them to visit us if they ever got to campus.

Just an idea worth consideration.

JC
Art Clifford on April 23rd, 2008 4:30 pm

John,

I really like your idea for creating a librarian dedicated to distance learning. I know that’s a little ambitious budget-wise but perhaps there are some folks out there willing to try it part time.

I’ve had students who were scared stiff at the prospect of navigating the library web site. Conversely, I’ve had some folks who felt reborn after using some of the cool features on the library site. For instance, most students have never seen a Congressional Research Service report. Finding a list of them is nearly impossible. But, research librarians can hook students up and kabam! Students are using primary source material and they found it on the library web site. Yow.

I will find an excuse to buy several librarians some cups of coffee. When they are sufficiently caffeinated, I will mention your great idea. If they hate the idea, I’ll tell them I didn’t think of it (just kidding).

This idea makes so much sense I wish that I had thought of it. Seems that at least one of the UMass campus libraries should try it.

I’ll get back on this.

Best,
Art
Dr. Frank Faulkner on April 25th, 2008 12:10 pm

Art/John

As a DL instructor perched on a cliff 2,893 miles and five time zones from the UMass Library, I certainly support the idea of a dedicated DL librarian — perhaps using the hospital “on-call” model.

Purchasing digitalized goodies and access without an easy off-site guide seems akin to a huge parts warehouse without an inventory system.

Some of my UMass online students are, like me, thousands of miles and many time zones from the UMass system — and the number of these far-flung users should soar while bricks-and-mortar users remain fairly constant.

In a short while, I think not having a dedicated DL librarian might become an indictable offense in academe. Justification for e-learning programs, online journal access, and digitalized materials should require a link with these truely distance users.

More than half my online students are not traditional UMass students and not even in New England. Each semester, more of these students from other states and nations realize the added value of online library access that comes with their tuition for online courses.

A good access system for users might even become a rationale for some to enroll in a course a year just to have online access to library materials.

Budgets are always tight, but I would guess that if someone compared the costs of online materials with the salary costs of dedicated DL librarians, and then factor in the potential of earnings from increased online enrollment, the answer might be obvious.

The direction is obvious, there will be more online materials and more online students — access might be the bottleneck.

Proinsias Faulkner
Dingle, County Kerry
Ireland
Art Clifford on April 25th, 2008 3:56 pm

Pronsias,

I remember when your student in Jakarta needed a book and the fastest way to send it was electronically. The Library rescued this poor student from having to wait three weeks.

Thanks for adding to the discussion.
John Callahan on April 26th, 2008 11:11 am

Hi all
I appreciate the response to my entry but it is important to correct something - many schools involved in DL already have DL librarians. A quick google search will bring up many school’s web presence of a dedicated DL librarians/info expert to help DL faculty and students. In speaking to DL libraians at other schools I know there is an annual get together of DL librarians - the details are at work and I will look them up Monday - and there are websites and blogs focused on this subject. I don’t know a UMass focused DL librarian although I know our strategy at UML is to deal with the DL people as we deal with all patrons, in an integrated approach. So, please, i am not the first to think this one up but it does warrant some thought.
JC
Art Clifford on May 1st, 2008 4:24 pm

Hi John,

Yes, I had some hint of movement out there but I didn’t realize that DL librarians were showing up at so many places. When I started teaching online, our campus sent two librarians to brief new instructors on available resources. It was a very helpful 90 minutes.

The integrated approach to helping patrons is, of course, the ideal. My experience, however, is that some librarians have less time to stay current in online activities. It’s easy to imagine given the range of responsibilities librarians have.

Still, the thought of having someone in the library dedicated to Distance Learning is compelling.

I love walking through the stacks, it smells like knowledge and there’s a certain serendipity that’s missing in online searches. (of course one could argue that’s becoming less common since libraries depend on repositories for storing books by the millions)

I still haven’t bought a Kindle and I still use the library but I’m hoping that UMassOnline will encourage further discussion of the DL librarian idea. Think I will go buy a used book…

Art