Teaching Smart: Developing Reusable Instructional Modules on the Web

摘要

With the advent of the Internet both teaching and learning are taking on new shapes and boundaries. As a consequence, the librarian's responsibilities for teaching, and the impact of that teaching on learning, are both under critical evaluation. Requests to librarians for information literacy training has reached the proportions of an educational epidemic. A tipping point was reached when librarians alone were unable to meet these demands. Old ways of instruction are now giving way to newer and more efficient methods of teaching, reaching an ever-larger number of students. Additionally, the increasing ratio of students to librarians in large public research universities is an important factor stimulating the development of reusable instructional modules for information training that require minimal revision. This paper discusses a web based library instructional module that was specifically configured to be reused for multiple sections of the same course. The module was designed to be embedded seamlessly and explicitly into the course work of a lower level undergraduate communication studies course at a large public research university in the United States. Textual analyses of students' responses to an online questionnaire that was embedded as part of the tutorial contain some surprising revelations regarding what students most value in infonnation literacy instruction and what they consider to be least useful.