Library Skills course: your 2.0 thoughts

I'm responsible for a 1-credit Library Skills course at my library. I inherited this course and while I have tweaked it to hell and back it's time to start thinking about either scrapping it and start over, or try to integrate it into our course management system (Blackboard, but the grading system kinda sucks). Couple of things about the course:

1. It's a self-paced course, grade is pass/fail
2. Usually about 100+ students sign up for it
3. It's a beginning level course
4. There are 22 assignments in the course (lots of paperwork)
5. A big part of the assignments require the use of library resources, so it students have to come to the library

I'm looking for suggestions/ideas/best practices about the best way to bring this course to the 21st century, or to give me a sense of what's working for people out there in Libraryland. The course is at http://library.boisestate.edu/skills/

Many thanks!
Memo

Tags: courses, library skills

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Permalink Reply by Misti Smith on June 5, 2007 at 8:42am

I didnt look in every single assignment, but do you have many assignments relating to the OPAC and using the online databases? I find that it is really hard for students to understand how they are acutally finding journal articles unless they are full-text. What I mean is that they dont see the correlation between a online journal index and an acutal paper index. Then once they find the article they want in said index, they havent a clue how to find it (ex. search catalog for journal title, see if we have journal in full-text elsewhere or ILL)
Hope this helps!

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Permalink Reply by Memo Cordova on June 5, 2007 at 10:53am

Thanks for looking into it, Misti. I do have a couple of chapters dealing with the OPAC and the research databases. However, I think they could be expanded, particularly in the contextual relation between online and paper formats, and in making the connection of how indexes play out in both formats. Good points!

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Permalink Reply by Memo Cordova on June 6, 2007 at 10:49am

Thanks for the suggestion, hcmurdock. CSLA is doing great things with its virtual course and I could take some pointers from their online approach. My course is heavily text-centric as it deals with the multitude of print resources available in libraries as well as a handful of chapters on our online databases. Perhaps it's time to start a major shift in the course that touches on core print resources (which ones?) with an emphasis on online databases, web resources, and information literacy...