We’re Not in Kansas Anymore
rnelson February 28th, 2007
Cindi Trainor, Director of Library and Information Technology at Claremont Colleges gave an interesting presentation on how the library has become integrated in course content and curriculum at Claremont College. I’m not too familiar with the various learning management systems (LMS) so this was a particularly informative session.
The presentation centered on how libraries have become embedded in the curriculum at Claremont Colleges as librarians work with faculty in creating library instruction in courses. Claremont colleges had several different LMS’, which made it difficult for a student to navigate an online course because they were constantly confronted with a new interface to learn. They decided there was a need to simplify things and decided to go with one LMS and they choose Sakai, an open source LMS developed by Univ. of Michigan, Indiana, MIT and Standford.
Once they selected Sakai, they moved very quickly. They added all courses to Sakai, included a link to the library web page from each course, taught faculty how to find library content and provided documentation and training. They accomplished all of this in 3 months-impressive!
Through screen captures Trainor demonstrated how the library is embedded in the LMS.
For example, the studnet logs into the LMS site. It contains a list of their courses, an E-resource checklist, recent announcements, assignments, and other various content items. Depending on the class, there may be a link to the other library resources that pertain to this specific course. Trainor did mention that the concept of an embedded librarian isn’t applicable to every course. For instance, a chemistry lab course may not include links to library materials.
Trainor also talked about how other applications can be integrated into Sakai. It’s possible to create images in Content DM and export an html page that refers to all of these images. So, for example, an instructor can mark a particular set of images and the export an html page that shows direct links back to these images. One can also create lists of citations using Sakai and Trainor demonstrated this as well.
There is a lot more depth within the presentation that I’m able to share, but I think this is definitely a good one, particularly for libraries who are trying to become more integrated into classroom instruction. Trainor showed us how with hard work, a dedicated staff, and cooperation between the library and IT staff the library can become central in the learning process.
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We are also able to enter this into the email contact line when registering as administrators on web sites or registering to add access for single titles on smaller vendor sites.
