More Remote Learners in Your Future | From the Bell Tower

Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA -- Library Journal, 07/16/2009

In 2008 gas prices in the United States escalated rapidly to $150 a barrel and soon prices at the pump in excess of $4 a gallon shocked Americans into changing many long-term habits. They traded in their gas guzzlers for hybrids, staycation became a part of our vocabulary, and we began to rethink the wisdom of life in exurbia.

What does this have to do with higher education? High gas prices got adult learners questioning the value of driving an hour each way to a college campus. Suddenly, online learning became vastly more attractive to a whole segment of higher education’s market. Articles about fuel prices driving students to online courses became as prevalent as those about the impact of the recession on higher education are right now. While the price of fuel has retreated to a more manageable range, the number of Americans flocking to online higher education has shown no such decline.

Barriers are falling
It’s difficult to argue against the convenience factor of online learning. Just look at what’s happening in library science education. At Drexel University, where I occasionally teach an online course in their College of Information Science & Technology, approximately 70 percent of all students are completing degrees entirely online. The other 30 percent take mostly F2F (face-to-face) courses, but nearly all take one or more online courses toward their degrees. For many of these students, like the one from Alaska in my most recent online course, distance learning is the only option for earning an MLS.

What else is likely to drive more learners to go online? One long-term barrier, the perception about the lower quality of online learning of both students and employer, may soon be a thing of the past.

Online is good, and blended is better
A recently released study from the Department of Education reported that online learners, on average, performed better than students who took the same course in a F2F classroom. Even more interesting, students who take courses that involve both elements of F2F and online learning, referred to as “blended learning,” do even better. The report does include a number of caveats with respect to the data, primarily noting that there are significant variables that can impact the quality of online learning. In other words, the message to higher education institutions was to think carefully before rushing towards online learning. In typical government fashion the report concluded that more research is necessary.

Reflective of the controversy and disagreement that accompanies any discussion about the comparative quality of F2F and online learning, there were an astoundingly high 47 comments made to the Inside Higher Education article reporting this study. The comments reflect the fairly strong opinions many faculty have toward online learning. However, despite ongoing uncertainties about the relative quality of online learning, higher education is likely to invest in more of it because it satisfies a growing demand. Whatever its stand on the quality issue, looking at it from the business perspective, no institution wants to be left out on the online learning market.

Even if your institution is slow getting into online learning, another trend worth watching is the spread of satellite campuses. With untapped learners looking for convenient higher education, more institutions are putting mini-campuses out where those potential students are. When it happens, don’t expect those convenience seekers to trek an hour or more to your library.

Are you ready for remote learners?
How is this trend likely to affect their traditional ways of serving students and faculty? Take the reference desk. More online learners means less F2F desk traffic. Academic libraries are well situated to serve online learners via chat and IM technologies, but will online learners even know these resources exist? And what of the academic library’s learning mission? Information literacy initiatives made great strides in the last decade and many institutions now accept the importance of incorporating it into the curriculum. Sure, online tutorials are getting easier to produce, but is this disconnected instruction approach the future for information literacy?

Convincing faculty to dedicate F2F class time for library instruction is always a challenge. How will getting into the classroom in real-time translate to online instruction? I see a number of hurdles to it becoming routine practice. My own experience is that arranging even a simple asynchronous chat session with students spread out across every time zone is difficult at best. Perhaps pre-recorded instruction videos may be the wave of the future. None of us knows exactly what the future of online education holds for libraries, but there’s no question that any number of traditional practices will need re-thinking and re-engineering.

Follow the leaders
Fortunately there are some academic libraries that are experiencing the future now. Their institutions, particularly community colleges, are already heavily invested in online learning. That means there are some best practices in the pipeline. The Association of College & Research Libraries has a section dedicated to the academic libraries delivering services to distance learners.

Our literature contains a growing body of articles about more efficient ways to connect with and serve these busy online learners who are often so different from our traditional 18-22 year old on-campus students. We will all need to start paying more attention to what our more experienced colleagues have discovered about effective library services for distance learners. Think it might not happen at your college? Wait until gas hits $5 at the pump.

Steven Bell is Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA.  For more from Steven visit his blogs, Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog and Designing Better Libraries or visit his web site.

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