Online Learning to teach Information Skills

I was completing a survey for QUT and one of the questions was "What skills do you think you will be using most over the next 5 years?". My response was: Skills to create content for Online Learning.

There has never before been so many easy-to-use tools to create interactive learning content in education. Well, that's how it seems to me. Perhaps it's only because I'm beginning to use Adobe Presenter and Captivate that it seems that way. But the tools are great and they produce things of reasonable quality without too much effort.

I think that more library training will be delivered online in the future. This will expand the audience and hopefully make learning easier. I know that I learn a lot quicker when I'm interacting with content, and engaging with it, rather than just reading it or being lectured about it.

I can see a number of positives for online learning or 'e-learning':
* Online collections and journal databases will be used more.
* Students can learn at any time.
* Information can be quickly updated.
* Less paper used as brochures and guides are accessed online.

Negatives:
* Need for up-to-date technology
* Less students may be physically coming into the library.
* Students need to have a certain level of e-literacy to be able to use online learning tools. However, assisting students to gain that level of e-literacy is important anyway. Another negative though is the staff time required to assist the students who require additional assistance to use e-learning tools.
* Students are not always self-motivated, independent learners.
* Creating online learning modules takes staff time, and staff need to have a relatively high level of skill to produce them.

Although this list of negatives is longer than the positives, I still think that online learning is a fantastic thing for libraries to utilise and that the positives are more valuable than the negatives. What do you think?

Moodling with Information Literacy

I was checking out some of the papers at the ALIA Access 2010 conference and enjoyed reading a paper written by a couple of librarians from Sydney Institute, TAFE NSW. The paper is called "Moodling along with Libraries - supporting online flexible delivery in TAFE NSW". The paper discusses the way that Librarians are collaborating with Faculties to create content that assists students with Information Literacy. It is quite an exciting time to be working in the Education sector as there are many fantastic tools to assist with content creation - that look professional and are easy to use. Moodle and Equella are used by TAFE NSW, and a number of Institutes have recently invested in LibGuides to create subject guides. The hype about LibGuides is large, so I'm looking forward to experimenting with them sometime soon.