From the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).
The webinar, “MOOCs and Libraries: A Brewing Collaboration” took place yesterday (August 12, 2015). Slides are embedded below.
Presenters
- Todd Carpenter, Executive Director, NISO
- Heather Ruland Staines, Director, Publisher and Content Strategy, ProQuest SIPX
- Kyle Denlinger, eLearning Librarian, Wake Forest University Z. Smith Reynolds Library
- Rebecca Hyman, Reference and Outreach Librarian, Government and Heritage Library, State Library of North Carolina
- Barrinton Baynes, Multimedia Projects Manager, Gelardin New Media Center, Georgetown University Library
Blurb From NISO Website
The development and rising popularity of the massive open online course (MOOC) presents a new opportunity for libraries to be involved in the education of patrons, to highlight the resources libraries provide and to further demonstrate the value of the library to administrators. There are, of course, a host of logistics to be considered when deciding to organize or support a MOOC. Diminished library budgets and staffing levels challenge libraries both monetarily and administratively. Marketing the course, mounting it on a site, securing copyright permissions and negotiating licensing for course materials, managing the course while in progress and troubleshooting technical problems add to the issues that have caused some libraries to hesitate in joining the MOOC movement.
On the other hand, partnerships such as that between Georgetown University and edX, itself an initiative of Harvard and MIT, allow a pooling of resources thereby easing the burden on any one library. In some cases price breaks for certain course materials used in MOOCs can help draw students to the course, though the pricing must still be negotiated by the course organizer. A successful MOOC, such as the RootsMOOC, created by the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University and the State Library of North Carolina, can bring awareness of library resources to a broad audience.
In February 2015, NISO’s Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee commissioned a White Paper from library consultant Marshall Breeding. The in-person meeting will be an extension of the white paper with a series of presenters and panels to offer an overview of the current resource discovery environment. Attendees will participate in conversations that will examine possibilities regarding how these technologies, methodologies, and products might be able to adapt to changes in the evolving information landscape in scholarly communications and to take advantage of new technologies, metadata models, or linking environments to better accomplish the needs of libraries to provide access to resources.
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