Wednesday, 4 April 2012

Successful Curriculum Integration and Support Webinar

This was the 2nd of 4 webinars that JISC are hosting. This session was about your library being an integral part of the curriculum. Thus demonstrating your value and worth to senior managers as well as being good practice.

The first talk was by Jane Spellman from Queen Elizabeth 6th Form College in Darlington, who I know quite well through local networking. Jane said that we need to be professional, know your institution, spot gaps and be proactive and shout about what you do. It's great to know that we are doing all the right things, so where do we go from here? I'll start where Jane and her team do a lot more than us:
  1. Using the Exam Officer to find out exactly which courses are running and which exam board they are using, so that we can then go and search online for upto date specifications.
  2. Passing along everything we do for a department to include in their self assessment report, at the moment we only send resource information (how much we've spent and on what)
I also especially liked that Jane included the poll feature in her presentation. This made it more interactive than the other webinar I had done.

The second presentation was by Ihar Ivanov and Lin Armstrong about their information literacy programme which puts the emphasis for learning on the students. The librarians and teachers act as faciliators for students who learn through self discovery, with assistance from their peers and the facilitators. The learning is documented via reflection and recorded using various Web 2.0 tools.

Mike Parker from Burton and South Derbyshire College did the final presentation. The main point of it was that they are very involved with curriculum delivery and are very close to the teaching staff. It sounds impressive until you actually analyse what they are doing in more depth. In addition to the information literacy librarians traditionally deliver, they are delivering functional skills for 11 hours per week. So they are actually doing the teachers' work but on the salary of a librarian / library assistants. This caused a bit of a stir from the webinar delegates who thought that the library skills were not being valued.

More information on the session and links to the speakers can be found on the JISC RSC wiki.

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