Continuing Education Tiptoes Online: Where Are the Quality Guidelines?

摘要

The library and information science field seems to be embracing online distance education for master's degree courses at an increasing rate. In the continuing education (CE) area, however, the face-to-face delivery mode is the prevailing one for the majority of American Library Association-accredited programs. This is somewhat counterintuitive, as one would expect that the risks of experimenting with new methods would be less of a problem for CE than for degree programs. There were 37 schools that delivered master's courses via telecommunication in 2000-2001. The latest data on CE collected for the annual ALISE statistics show that in the 2001-2002 academic year, only thirteen schools presented one or more of their non-credit CE offerings using technology such as videoconferencing or Internet delivery. With the exception of Toronto, the number of events delivered by alternative modes ranged from one to thirty. If we exclude Toronto's 138 online courses, the number of alternative events drops to 84 out of 576, or 15 percent. Admittedly, that is a lot higher than the 3 percent reported for the 1996-1997 year, when Educational Telephone Network held sway. Since then, the use of Internet delivered CE, in particular, has increased steadily, but the number of programs experimenting with it remains low.