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Connections, April 2009

The Faculty-Library Connection: An Online Faculty Development Workshop

Tom Riedel, Distance Services Librarian

Regis University

Online academic libraries can be tricky for distance students to navigate, but the likelihood that students will avail themselves of library resources decreases significantly if their course instructors don’t suggest or require that they do so—after all, there is always Google.  Recognizing that faculty are unlikely to require students to use the library when faculty themselves are not aware of library resources and navigation, two Regis University Distance Learning Librarians and the Assistant Director of Distance Learning for the Regis College for Professional Studies teamed in 2004-2005 to create an online, facilitated faculty development workshop called The Faculty-Library Connection. Hosted on the university’s course management system, the workshop is facilitated by librarians with the goal of promoting student information literacy by training faculty to create course-integrated library activities that foster higher-level thinking.

The workshop is structured in six modules designed so that geographically-dispersed faculty from a range of disciplines and in all three colleges of the university interact asynchronously in the class forum over a two-week period. Early in the workshop the theoretical concepts of information literacy are introduced and discussed, then participants learn about the resources and tools for searching databases in their subject disciplines.  Search activities are followed by a section on evaluating information and finally, to make the workshop relevant and readily applicable, participants are asked to complete a capstone activity in which they revise a lesson from a current course to include a library activity. Throughout the workshop, reading and searching activities are reinforced by forum discussions that require faculty to reflect as well as to respond to their colleagues’ postings. Participants authentically experience using library resources remotely, from finding readings on electronic reserve to selecting relevant databases and searching them.  Interactivity in the form of games created by distance learning multimedia experts enhances the workshop, and learning is augmented by links to library tutorials created using Adobe Captivate software (http://www.regis.edu/library.asp?page=research.tutorials.fivesteps).

The Faculty-Library Connection workshop has been offered several times since its launch in 2005, and more than half the respondents to an early survey indicated that it met or exceeded their expectations. Specifically, they found value in learning to locate scholarly articles through the Regis library web site; learning tricks to better navigate resources and how to find credible articles; being able to design a unit to use with students; and learning from the comments of fellow participants.  At the same time, the workshop allows librarians to reach a large population of dispersed faculty while also raising their visibility as facilitators. 

The Faculty-Library Connection workshop was a 2005 award finalist from the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education.  For more information, please contact the author at triedel@regis.edu, or see:  McCaffrey, Erin, Tina Parscal and Tom Riedel. “The Faculty-Library Connection: An Online Workshop.”  Co-published in Journal of Library Administration 45 no 1/2 (2006): 279-300, and The Twelfth Off-Campus Library Services Proceedings. Mount Pleasant, Michigan: Central Michigan University, 2006.