Massive Open Online Courses

Guzman, Laura

Gore, H. (2014). Massive open online courses (MOOCs) and their impact on academic library services: Exploring the issues and challenges. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 20(1), 4-28.

Descriptive Summary:

This article discusses the impact that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are having on academic library services.  MOOCs are unique because they are usually free, with no time boundaries or prerequisites, and have the ability to remix content to individual needs.  At one time a class could have hundreds of thousands of students. 

MOOCs began when the University of Manitoba, Canada launched an open course in 2008.  Shortly afterwards, Stanford University began free online courses which became a start-up called Udacity.  Now there are dozens of other organizations sponsoring MOOCs such as Coursera, Khan Academy, and edX.  Coursera has developed the largest peer-grading system to date with thousands of students reviewing each other’s work. 

Where does the librarian fit into these MOOCs?  Information literacy is crucial to the success of these courses.  The librarian needs to continue to connect people with information.  A newer role for librarians is to be an ambassador for collaboration between students, professors, and this online environment.  A librarian might help a professor by questioning sources, choosing a presentation medium, developing a search strategy, selecting relevant databases and resources, and formulating questions.  A few challenges might be influencing faculties, copyright, delivering remote services, and dealing with a very diverse group of students.  

Evaluation:

It is not surprising that MOOCs are growing tremendously.  The idea of free education will appeal to so many people.  I have never taken a MOOC, but would like to try it to see how it differs from regular online courses.  MOOCs will be especially popular for those who would like enrichment learning after already completing a degree program.  MOOCs are definitely links that we can add to our research guides in the academic library.  

Teaching Old Dogs New eTricks

Evan Washechek

References: https://techboomers.com/

With the vast amount of options for teaching tools online, I thought that I had knowledge of at least most of what the internet had to offer. Recently a coworker of mine did a demonstration on Techboomers.com this website provides ultra-basic tutorials for various websites, apps and online services and software. These range from Facebook, Google Hangouts, Angie’s List to Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, Overdrive, Amazon, Ebay and many more. If you simply go to the page you see that they are constantly updating their selection as new forms of media arise and gain popularity. This is all in addition to their 50+ sites and Internet 101, both services going after their target demographic as mentioned in their name (techboomers) Baby Boomers who aren’t as proficient with technology as they would like to be. These tutorials provide content that isn’t demoralizing or meant for children. While the language isn’t college level, the wordings are age appropriate. In addition, the examples used make adults feel at home using basic software, which is an accomplishment.

There are certainly patrons who avoid anything to do with technology and have to be forced onto the computer for life or death issues (taxes, critical contacts who only email, big ticket purchases from venders who only deal online such as tickets) This program (techboomers) might not best serve those patrons.  If they had support from someone to walk them through step by step, each program and explain why they would want to use these services it might be more relevant.

The target patrons here are those who have a desire to better themselves and think of this service as a MOOC or Massive Online Open Course. A student with that attitude would be able to pick and choose and would also be willing to go through one of the chapter driven sessions simply to find out what a certain program or service has to offer. The courses do have a small description concerning each one, so the patrons will have some idea but the idea of reducing amazon’s services to one or two sentences is certainly shorting some manner of their services.