As the Fall semester of 2009 begins across college campuses throughout the country and abroad, significant opportunities for librarians to continue to assert themselves have once again emerged. In fact, trends now seem to indicate a continued push for online learning environments, whether they be fully online classes or hybrid-style courses. In either case, there has been a definite shift in the ways many students are pursuing higher education and with an ever increasing dependence on advancing technologies.
Unfortunately, some of these same students, at least through my own anecdotal experience, are somewhat less than thrilled about this radical change to the virtual classroom, which could be largely due to a lack of comfort and familiarity with this new educational medium and perhaps more fundamentally, a deficiency in sophisticated internet use in general. Some students are even downright disgruntled and mad that they are being mandated to take their courses in this form, particularly if it's their first experience with online learning. I've even received at least one message from a student in my library suggestion box asking to eliminate online classes altogether, as if we had anything to do with designing their curriculum.
What these students both want and need in circumstances such as these is a reliable and helpful human in the actual flesh and blood to which they could turn. Such a desire also makes perfect sense. Wouldn't we rather speak directly to a live operator than having to navigate on our own the tiresome maze of some convoluted automated phone system? The answer is invariably yes and the same concept applies to the frustrations of taking classes online as well, though on an even grander scale.
Even if students do have access to their online instructors via email or live chat, which is often the case, the physical void the student may encounter could be filled in most instances by a librarian simply willing to offer their expert assistance. Sometimes, students just need help making sense of the electronic interface through which they're taking their courses, particularly when it comes to viewing assignments, uploading their work, technical issues with desktop publishing software, and so on. Other times, they might need help locating particular kinds of informational resources for their assignments, which could also serve as a perfect opporunity to plug those typically glossed over online databases, or to just receive some guidance using proper citation and so forth.
The first trick is basically to lure these needy students into the library, make yourself visible, and after that, they're pretty much all yours. With this potential demographic to be tapped in mind, a new marketing strategy ought to be considered in which libraries gear the promotion of their services in a way that specifically targets individuals enrolled in online classes. Such an effort would be a perfect example of "demonstrating value" rather than just proclaiming it.
