Can the power of technology improve teaching and learning? And what role will libraries play in this rapidly emerging field of e-learning?

By Tom Storey

Each new wave of technology brings a burst of enthusiasm on how it can transform instruction and learning. There was film, then television, both of which were heralded as paradigm changing, but both of which have had little impact on education. Today, it’s the World Wide Web, and the potential this graphical computer network has to radically change education as we know it.

Unlike television and film, however, the Web appears to be delivering on its promise to reshape learning, although at a much slower pace than previously anticipated. And libraries are poised to support Web-based e-learning by creating and managing econtent, developing new services and linking their current ones to course management systems, the hub for e-teaching and e-learning.

Indeed, Patricia Albanese, Chief Information Officer and Executive Director of Library, Information & Technology Services at Mount Holyoke College, says that e-learning and e-content represent a golden opportunity for libraries to expand their role in the digital age.

“This is a very exciting time for libraries,” she says. “Electronic elements are changing the way faculty and students access, create and use information, and libraries can play a role in helping their communities effectively combine content and technology.”

Proliferation of Web-based, e-learning

The emergence of a network culture and the digital student are among the factors driving the rapid growth of Web-based, e-learning—whether it's courses taught online over a distance or traditional courses that have been enhanced with electronic elements. And e-learning’s convenience, reach and novel pedagogical resources can potentially improve education by providing high quality, customized instruction to the greatest number of people.

Consider these statistics

According to a report from the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, 80% of U.S institutions offer e-learning courses.

The corporate market for e-learning in 2004 is estimated at $23 billion, up from less than $2 billion five years ago.

Two e-learning companies are in the top ten of Fortune magazine’s 100 fastest growing companies: Career Education ($849 million) and Corinthian Colleges ($473 million).

Enrollment growth in the online program of the University of Phoenix, one of the first accredited universities to provide college degrees via the Internet, was up 61 percent in 2003 from the year before.

Course management systems (CMS) are the portals for e-learning programs and have spurred their growth and expansion. According to the Campus Computing Project, about 80 percent of colleges have committed themselves to a commercial vendor for their course-management systems, with the leading providers being Blackboard and WebCT.

Using CMS, faculty prepare and deliver multimodal, educational content electronically to students who then in turn are able to interact with instructors in a variety of ways, including participatory learning activities, submitting assignments and completing
assessments. Courseware environments are the place where digital information and knowledge are created, accessed and used, and students tend to use them as their primary gateway.

E-content supports e-learning

E-content is the heart of e-learning. Online articles, streaming video, audio segments, images, specially designed Web sites and unique learning objects—these electronic elements are created to enhance courses and improve learning. They may be selected segments from a larger information resource, such as a video clip, or a custom-made object designed by a faculty member,
such as an animated map that shows how national boundaries have changed over time. They engage today’s computer-savvy student, whose learning style is more interactive, having been raised with computers, the Internet and video games.

While many of the e-learning businesses of the late 1990s have not lived up to expectations, preliminary evidence suggests that e-learning programs are changing teaching and enhancing learning. University Web sites are full of examples.

At Duke University, for example, a law professor makes 20-minute documentary videos to help his classes understand case law. Students prepare for a lecture by watching a video over the Web and reading a summary of the case from a textbook. To test the effectiveness of the video, the professor asked half of the students in one class to watch the video and read the case, while the other half only read the case. Test results indicated that students who watched the video scored markedly higher on questions about both the details of the case and its legal implications.

At the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, a variety of math courses, ranging from Calculus 1 to Differential Equations, are available through MathOnline, a program that blends traditional instruction with Web-based learning. Faculty wear wireless microphones and use graphics tablets to stream voice and lecture notes via the Web to students’ computers. The tablet images and the audio also enter an archive for future playback. Students can attend class or view the lectures via the Internet. Messages from Internetbased students appear during the lecture in a chat box.

Faculty have found that while there is no significant difference between the grades earned by in-class or online students, the blended model receives higher student satisfaction ratings than traditional classes.

Putting libraries in the equation

In the digital education environment, libraries are challenged to integrate and expose their services and content into the e-learning system, as well as take on new duties, such as creating content and managing digital repositories.

Nonetheless, many are already bringing the CMS and library together to meet students at their point of need.

At Penn State University, librarians work with faculty to select and link library resources to the CMS through customized subject guides and e-reserve readings. The hotlinks appear in the Tools menu and connect students to appropriate databases, Web sites and other materials related to the course. Most importantly, the hotlinks create a one-click-to-the-library environment for students.

Librarians at Holy Cross University merged their electronic reserves program into the university’s CMS. They also are creating and customizing electronic resources, such as pathfinders, handouts and course pages, for the system and training faculty how to use it.

The libraries at the Naval Post Graduate School and Eastern Kentucky University run Web sites on their campus networks that help faculty integrate library resources into course management systems. And librarians at the University of Washington are
taking a leadership role in creating new knowledge bases and assisting faculty and students to build and structure specialized databases.

The future

“E-learning has created an environment in which change is the norm culturally, institutionally and technically,” says Ms. Albanese. “Strategically, libraries are keenly interested in integrating their systems and services into learning management systems environments because today’s students are creating e-portfolios to organize and track their work. They wish to search and discover from within the learning management system and create dynamic information and learning sets on the fly. Integration efforts will have to accommodate these organizational and learning activities.”

Updates | Gaming in the college classroom