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OCLC and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries held a forum on MOOCs and Libraries on March 18th and 19th. This is the first post in a short series on that event. You can also check out the event page for links to videos, presenters’ slides, and more!

It’s been a few weeks, but it still feels like I’m catching my breath following our well attended (and I think successful!) forum, MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge? This event was an attempt to get beyond the plethora of what I’d call “MOOC 101″ and instead focus on the issues facing libraries that are engaging or may soon be engaging with MOOCs. I was fortunate to be tasked with such an engaging topic, and doubly fortunate to team up with Martha Brogan at the University of Pennsylvania and her colleagues (Anuradha Vedantham, Shawn Martin, and Marjorie Hassen) — the University of Pennsylvania Libraries were perfect partners because they haven’t just been thinking about MOOCs, they have been actively engaged with all aspects of MOOCs from planning, to production, to assessment. U. Penn was an early implementer on the Coursera platform, and have now been through several course cycles. I was also fortunate to work with my colleague Chrystie Hill, who lead the charge in bringing public library voices into the event. I was also fortunate, in event planning, to be able to draw upon the expertise resident in the OCLC Research Library Partnership — in November of 2012, I knew little more about MOOCs than what was covered in the popular press. I was educated by colleagues who are working in the field, who spoke from a basis of knowledge and experience, and who were willing to share with me via phone conversations and emails during December and January (my findings are summarized in an earlier post, MOOCs and Libraries: a look at the landscape).

We had a sell out crowd of 125 people attend in person and record breaking online attendance of over 400 (hardly MOOC like, but for sustained attention from afar, it’s very good). We were also fortunate to have a very strong Twitter stream, with contributions from both in person and remote attendees, which helped to “amplify” the event. And we have a record of the meeting in the recorded video (which you may enjoy watching!). Still, I think it’s important to have a summary of the meeting and some notable outcomes. I hope that some of you who attended (or who are able to watch the videos) will join in the conversation. And keep the conversation going by using the hash #mooclib when blogging or Tweeting on this topic.

Carton Rogers, Vice Provost & Director of Penn Libraries, and Ed Rock, Provost and Director of Open Course Initiatives, helped to set the scene for the group. Rogers underscored the confluence of support that the Penn Libraries provide to support learning — library resources, repository services, and courseware support. Deep engagement with Penn’s MOOC efforts was a natural next step for the library, and led to Penn’s hosting this first-of-a-kind meeting. Rock expanded on this, addressing, “Why MOOCs, why Penn, why now?”

The internet, Rock asserted, is now a place of learning so naturally one expects to find the university there. However, there is no one cookie cutter model for how universities engage with MOOCs — each institution needs to think out the role of MOOCs in their own framework. It’s already clear, from the Penn experience, that engaging with MOOCs has altered how people think about teaching — and this is a good thing. They’ve also seen that MOOCs can be used as an intervention in public discourse (a good example of this is the Penn course on vaccines). Rock also emphasized the democratic nature of MOOCs, with participants from residents in assisted living facilities, to autistic children, these courses are open to all ages and stages. He also speculated a bit about the role of the MOOC in a residential college setting — successful completion of a course that is eligible may be treated like an AP course — there is already a system for this in place. Or, a MOOC may be useful in helping students prepare for and test out of gateway classes.

Jim Michalko, Vice President OCLC Research (and a self confessed MOOC virgin), shared some context about MOOCs and online learning; we’ve been here before — or have we? What we have definitely seen before is the media frenzy around online learning or even distance learning — he referenced correspondence courses, Fathom, and Khan Academy, all of which are part of the heritage of what he called “the big three”: Udacity, EdX and Coursera which only launched a year ago. However, this time may well be different — Michalko cited Bill Bowen’s The ‘Cost Disease’
in Higher Education: Is Technology the Answer? as evidence of a “broken business model,” leaving institutions ripe for disruption (à la Clayton Christensen).

In closing he asked some pointed questions: “what business are we in?” “where is the venue for elite education online?” “are institutions engaging in a prestige arms race?” Finally, he predicted a platform war with MOOCs: “not everyone’s going to win.”

My presentation picked up where Jim left off: in all of this, where is the library? I presented findings from my research (which I have summarized previously): libraries are engaging in issues around copyright and IP, and are actively looking to see how to appropriately embed library services and research skills into these new and evoloving environments. Encouragingly, some libraries are part of the core teams being formed on campus which are planning and executing on MOOCs — these partnerships are vital, especially if MOOCs are seen as important to the campus. To be blunt, if it’s politically important, libraries need to be there. I also touched on the exciting ways that public libraries are thinking about MOOCs — not necessarily from the production side, but from the perspective of how these educational tools may fill a need for the diverse audiences they serve.

MOOCs (and online education) is a space in which things are evolving quite rapidly. I think it’s too soon for best practices, or declarations of success or failure. I think it’s a great time for experimentation, for trying things (and strategic abandonment!). This is also a perfect time to share the results of experiments. We are excited that this meeting was a step in that direction, and an important opportunity to share information with one another. But we’re not done yet — we’re at the beginning, not the end.

Next up, I’ll be summarizing the session on copyright, licensing and open access, so stay tuned!

Upfront admission: I work from home more than I work in the office. Having said that, either what I say makes sense or it doesn’t — decide for yourself.

Marisa Mayer, Yahoo!’s CEO, provoked outrage from the Internet by banning telecommuting for Yahoo employees. Such outrage was not difficult to predict in this age, with the Internet making it often better and more efficient for employees to work from home than the office. But of course like many things, there is more to this than meets the eye.

She has a point, There IS something to being able to walk down the hall and corner someone in their office. Or running into them while getting lunch or a cup of coffee. I get that, and that’s also why I travel on a regular basis, as my colleagues do even more, back to the Mother Ship. But partly this is still due to old ways of thinking, and please don’t make the mistake that this has anything to do with physical age.

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My colleague, Lorcan Dempsey, did a very nice synthesis of “MOOCs, Libraries, OCLC” for the OCLC Board of Trustees this morning. Given the massive attention and the surge of interest in MOOCs (witness that the article – Year of the MOOC – in the New York Times has stayed on the most emailed since it was published on 2 November 2012) he was asked to provide an overview and some foundational information so the trustees could have a preliminary discussion about the implications for libraries. Perhaps he will turn this into a piece for more general publication.

One of things he drew out was the ways in which MOOCs are forcing an exploration of the scale, shape and costs of pedagogy, prompting new thinking about assessment, and creating environments that can facilitate and take advantage of predictive and adaptive analytics. In talking about the shape of pedagogy he pointed out the ways in which they were consciously capitalizing on social technologies, gamification techniques, virtual laboratories and peer learning. MOOCs might become the vehicle that institutionalized the ‘flipped classroom’ as the norm.

I wasn’t very familiar with the ‘flipped classroom’ concept. I’d only come across it in reading about the Khan Academy. Teachers were assigning the Khan modular lectures as homework and then using the classroom time for personal tutoring, independent problem solving, inquiry-based activities, project-based learning and peer interaction. I now understand that the flipped classroom concept and approach is a much more broadly-established approach and that the Khan Academy example is just a specific manifestation of the concept. I found these three brief blog posts from leading proponents of the approach in secondary education to be very helpful.

As the trustee discussion proceeded Betsy Wilson, Dean of Libraries at the University of Washington seized on the flipped classroom observation saying that this is what libraries had been doing over the last ten years.

Everybody was already operating a flipped library.

I thought it was a spot-on analogy and very descriptive of where academic libraries have been heading. Consider that the current academic library no longer requires students and faculty to come to the libraries for their information seeking and consumption. It delivers materials online to the users preferred environment when they need the information in ways that support time-shifting consumption and repeated encounters. The library building is being re-imagined around support for independent study, collaborative work, group interactions and library services are being re-invented around support for the processes of learning and research rather than collections.

The phrase ‘flipped library’ is a very nice way to capture what’s going on. I’m going to start using it. I don’t know if it will gain traction. The phrase ‘flipped classroom’ seems to have gained widespread use because it had an accompanying catch phrase – “Moving from sage on the stage to guide on the side.” What’s the equivalent catch phrase for the flipped library? If you’ve got a candidate please share.

The flipped library in the photo is the Wyoming Branch of the Free Library at 231 East Wyoming Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19120 It was opened October 30, 1930 and was the last library funded by Carnegie.

I was fortunate to attend the final session of the recent Association of Research Libraries membership meeting on this topic. The panel of presentations served as the occasion for the release of a new briefing paper for research library directors, “21st-Century Collections: Calibration of Investment and Collaborative Action.”

The paper is the work of the ARL 21st-Century Research Library Collections Task Force, co-chaired by Deborah Jakubs at Duke University, and Tom Leonard at the University of California Berkeley. It’s worth your attention. The paper (pdf) focuses on the collaborative future of collections and looks at the future contours from the perspective of scholars/researchers, content, publishing and infrastructure. It’s very short and intended to be evocative and provocative as opposed to providing a blueprint or schematic on how to assemble the future it outlines. This caused some discussion during the meeting – should ARL be distilling the sense of the community and presenting it back or should it be an organization that organizes its members around an action plan to assemble the future? Given the diversity of the membership and the varying aspirations and resources of the institutions it’s hard to imagine that grand plan execution should be an ARL aspiration. That seemed to be the sense of those still assembled.

The closest to an action schematic in the discussion was the presentation by Wendy Pradt Lougee at the University of Minnesota, who said content is still a core role but the context for investments is changing as are the strategies which will require coordination and collaboration on a new scale. Her presentation titled Content & Collections:Rubrics and Rubiks is a must-read.

Her new rubric presents what I think is the correct formulation of the change that’s imperative and it highlights the inherent problem in arriving at that new equilibrium state. Essentially that state requires us to solve an equation whose left side is the newly optimized local circumstance (priorities, infrastructure, uniqueness) and whose right side is a set of shared supra-institutional factors (goals, priorities, infrastructure and services). The problem with the equation is that it has no constants. For local optimization to occur it needs to be aware of and rely on the supra-institutional factors – those are not yet in place and their characteristics not yet codified in a way that allows local choices to be made and operational processes to be confidently altered..

It seems to me that the challenge to supra-institutional providers of infrastructure and services is to define some of that future infrastructure and service provision in concert with the collective goals and priorities of those they intend to serve. Once defined those providers need to declare their intention to build, offer and sustain those services so that local institutional decisions can be definitively made. In the US there are quite a few actual and aspiring providers of shared infrastructure and services. OCLC is certainly one of the largest and is a pervasive provider along some important dimensions of the library service portfolio. Our challenge is to listen to the emerging desires of our members for a different class of shared services and then exercise leadership that commits to the provision of that infrastructure and those services where we have a unique capacity. This is the kind of change that would provide our members with the constants that let them optimally solve the local equation.

I’d like to put in a plug for the next event for those who are in the OCLC Research Libraries Partnership, which is
Libraries Rebound: Embracing Mission, Maximizing Impact (June 5-6, Philadelphia). We are still confirming speakers but so far we’ve got a great line up of speakers — we’re also adding reactor panels, so check out the program now and in a week or two to see how it’s shaping up.

The meeting will focus on how libraries can more closely tie services and collections to the university’s (or parent institution’s) mission. In the midst of static or decreasing budgets, being able to demonstrate impact in the pursuit of the institution’s research and teaching goals is paramount.

The day and a half meeting will focus on three themes:

We’re fortunate to have some smart people from forward-looking institutions who will share their knowledge and experiences with us. And the conversation and discussion will definitely spill into areas beyond the three themes I’ve outlined above. Which is where you come in — we need you to come and talk about what you have planned (as well as to learn from your peers). Register now! Always free for those in the partnership.

Questions? Let us know. We always love to hear from you.

One of the blogs I read with great pleasure is David Ferriero’s AOTUS: Collector in Chief. A recent posting on how to prepare the next generation (or what I would argue is the “now” generation) of information professionals caught my attention. The blog posting summarizes a keynote presentation David gave at a recent Association of Library and Information School Education (ALISE) meeting. He also includes a link to the full text of his talk.

I was struck by David’s list of desired qualities: tolerance for ambiguity, technical savvy, customer driven attitude all make the short list. Below the fold, in the text of his address are more skills for the nextGen/nowGen information professional: the ability to deliver results, to communicate with impact, to influence others, project management. Here’s my favorite:

The ability to demonstrate business savvy. Applying business principles, methods, and processes (e.g., ROI, cost-benefit analysis) to solve problems. Driving business results by planning and prioritizing activities consistent with organizational goals, using data and evaluating the costs, benefits, and impact on others when making business decisions.

I think David is (as usual) onto something, and I particularly appreciate him calling out the need to take a business-like approach. In the not so distant past people went out of their way to avoid using the “b” word, and I’m glad to see this shifting. I’m also struck by how different David’s list looks from ACRL’s Competencies for Special Collections Professionals which were written 5 years ago.

I do not read David’s list as a call out to the young to save us, because I believe many of us already have these skills, or are in a position to refocus. This is not rocket science, after all. I believe we can all become nowGen information professionals.

There are precious few library speakers upon whose every word I hang. Call me difficult to please. But one person who has achieved that status is Prof. David Lankes from the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. The dude rocks. And although he is a frequent speaker, including at the upcoming ALA Midwinter Meeting in Dallas, you don’t have to wait a single minute to hear him talk about some of his most important issues.

Last week I caught up with him virtually via Skype, and recorded him for our ongoing podcast series “What keeps you awake at night?” What resulted was a rollicking 25-minute romp through some fairly important issues for us all. Central to his theme was “raising expectations” — for ourselves, for our institutions, for the clienteles we serve. He also talked about making innovation a core part of what we do. To do this, he asserts, we need to create environments where taking risks and failing is OK, and he cites Seth Godin’s definitions for “mistake” vs. “failure”:

A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn’t move you directly closer to your goal.

A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding.

Prof. Lankes covers a lot more ground than this, including a segment on “dead wood” in the organization, and much better than I can attempt to parrot back to you. What I’m trying to do, if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is to intrigue you enough that you will listen to the whole thing. It’s only 20 minutes since I sped up the recording by 20%. Yes, we know your time is valuable. After all, you have some expectation raising to do.