Information Literacy Development at a Distance: Embedded or Reality? - April 19, 2012

I met Heather on the first day of my arrival in Memphis as we stood along the red carpet awaiting the departure from the fountain of the infamous Peabody ducks! She is from New Zealand and works at Massey University - a 4-campus institution with 52% online classes. Rings a bell...    Her presentation took a bit of a different approach to embedded librarianship than other sessions I attended; I appreciated her point-of-view. Her premise is that library skills is a small part of many courses, primarily due to the amount of content instructors need to cover. While faculty might appreciate a long information literacy section within their course, they can't afford the time. Heather's question to the audience was to think about if it really made sense to fully embed in online courses; she says no, it is more productive to take an integrated approach.  Massey's approach is to create a suite of online resources that are pretty generic and then customize/add to if needed for specific courses/assignment. While these Captivate tutorials do need to be kept up-to-date, they aren't needing to create a new one for each class and much content can be reused. Again the need to place the library information at the point-of-need for the students was highlighted; location/timing matters. She believes students need to learn the skills, and if librarians "hold their hand" each time they need to use the library, we aren't being good teachers. She takes more of a 'tough love' approach where students are redirected back to the content in their online course if they haven't already gone over it. She indicated that with this general content in so many online courses, the basics are learned/known by the students, so they can focus on more advanced searches in higher level courses.