M. Kathleen Kern, Editor
Print version (Adobe Reader required)
I was a little behind in getting this column finished. This semester I took on another project that has required a lot of time: teaching an introductory reference course online for a graduate school of LIS. Fortunately for me, this is a technology column in a reference journal, so I caught up with writing by making this column about teaching reference online. Seriously though, we use so much technology in our reference work and teaching made me look at reference and the technology we use in a new way. Teaching raised a lot of questions, and I will share those along with the answers I found (or at least the musings that I had).
Course Structure and Planning
In what ways is teaching different than training?
Every year for the last eight years I have provided training for the 50+ graduate assistants that work at my library and the ten that work in my department. This consists of about thirty-five hours of training in the week before fall classes start. It takes a group of librarians to provide this much training, but I help with the planning and teach several of the topics. I also lead about thirty more hours during weekly meetings for my department’s graduate assistants. This amounts to a lot of training, and I have had years to evolve the content and methods. I had an idea that I knew from doing this training, and from supervising our graduate assistants on the reference desk, exactly what I would want to teach in a reference course. When it came time to put together a syllabus, I realized how untrue this was. For a start, I know that the graduate assistants who work for me will take the reference course, generally in the first semester, and this does affect the content of my training. During training at my library we focus a lot on searching skills, but for the reference class I would be teaching, searching was not important as the students were taught this in a previous course.
Aside from these specific content considerations, there is a major philosophical difference between training and teaching, which may be best illustrated by an anecdote. Early in my time as graduate assistant coordinator in my reference department, one of the students I supervised asked: “Why do we do so many exercises in finding difficult-to-find citations for our weekly meetings? This won’t help me with my future work.” I acknowledged that this was true, as he would not use this skill much in a public library. However, he still needed to do the exercises as it was a vital skill for his current position working for me. At that time, we had a couple million brief-cat records in our library catalog—pairing that with the sometimes sketchy citations brought in by patrons meant a need for this specific training. Now that we have improved many of our catalog records, I have our graduate assistants do fewer of these exercises. My point? Teaching is not training. The goals are different. Training is as much for the needs of the workplace as for the employee. Teaching is for the student. I hope that when I train, the employees learn transferable skills. It is a requirement in teaching that the skills be transferable. This is where theory and research become important elements in the Master’s program, and a reference class cannot be entirely practice in answering questions.
Where do I even start?
Once I discovered that I knew more about training and less about teaching, I looked at other instructors’ syllabi, via the generosity of others and the openness of the Internet. I even made a spreadsheet to compare topics and the order of presentation, the assignments and readings. It would have been easiest to start with someone else’s syllabus, and perhaps I should have. When examining so many, it became difficult to choose and I ended up trying my own thing, building off of the work of many others.
What is the right order to present topics?
This question is still giving me fits. I still wonder if I taught the reference interview too late in the semester. (It was the fifth week.) In training our graduate assistants, I prefer to teach the reference interview before I teach sources. Part of that sequencing decision has to do with being face-to-face and the practice interview exercise. If the employees have just learned sources, they gravitate toward how to answer the question rather than focusing on the interview techniques. In preparing the reference course, however, I thought that the reference interview might seem too abstract to throw in at the beginning and that somehow learning about sources and types of reference questions would provide an anchor. Also, I knew that I wanted one of the three short papers to be about the reference interview, and it seemed a little early to assign on the second week of class.
The students also answered questions for the Internet Public Library (IPL) which I assigned for the last third or so of the class. My reasoning being that they needed to learn enough about sources and techniques to be able to have a foundation for answering questions. I still believe that this is true, but if I teach again I will have the students start one or two weeks sooner. I will also add a practice e-mail question or two before they start with the IPL. I think that this will ease some of the pressure of the 24-hour IPL turn-around; this is an appropriate policy for their service but made a few of the students feel under the gun. I will also be able to review these questions in a different way, providing feedback to the student without the response already being in the hands of the patron. I think that this will make the students more comfortable as well.
I am pleased with most of my assignments and discussion questions, but the order of the syllabus will be the biggest area of change if I teach this course again.
OnlIne Students and Teachers
Should I teach this course the same way as I would to an in-person class?
Obviously the differences in the learning environments make this impossible. The lectures and discussion are structured differently. What would be contained in one three-hour session in a classroom is spread out over the week.
The most vital, perspective-altering and assignment-affecting difference is geography. On-campus students can all be expected to use the same library and hence the same range of sources. With off-campus students I had no idea what they would have access to in print. I could have required that they visit a library of a certain type and size, but even that seemed impracticable. This led to more creativity in the reference sources assignments. Some instructors focus on source examination and comparison. While evaluation is an important aspect to learning reference sources, reference questions get students into sources in a different way. And they are fun. After all, we are interested in being reference librarians to answer questions, not to evaluate sources.
The reference questions were tricky. Sometimes I specified that students use both print and electronic sources. Electronic was easy since they all had access to the university’s subscriptions (as well as sources freely available online). But print? What could I ask that could be answered by a student working in a K–5 library, a student visiting a university library, and a student using her local public library? I wrote the questions to allow maximum flexibility in the sources used. For example: When was the Franco-Prussian War? What was the cause? Was there a decisive battle? I had asked students in the first week to describe the library that they would most often use for the course. It was interesting to see them relate their choice of sources back to their user population even when I did not explicitly asked them to do this in the assignment.
With the exception of an ill-fated National Union Catalog question (which I will never assign to a class again), I totally let go of teaching from a list of titles. Specific sources were part of the textbook, but nothing that I reinforced when I talked about types of sources. I would use this same type of exercise again, even on-campus, as it gives the student the most range to mimic answering questions in the type of library setting where she plans to work.
What makes a good (online) discussion topic?
In-person discussion flows in a different way than online. The synchronous nature of the communication leads to questions building off of each other in a way that rarely happens online. On the other hand, an online discussion board gives everyone a chance to add their responses as the conversations stay online for response and do not drift off in the ephemeral way of face-to-face conversation.