Academic Technology & Networks.
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Office of the Provost |
Self-Paced Internet Literacy for Pre-Professional Education2.Abstract Current SILS courses INLS 80 and INLS 181 are important for teaching undergraduate and graduate students about Internet Literacy. However, these courses are available primarily to students in SILS courses on the UNC-CH campus. This proposal is to make self-paced online versions of the courses available statewide. An important audience for the online courses will be students who are preparing to start professional or undergraduate education at SILS or elsewhere.3.Project Director Gregory B. Newby4. Co-Investigators/Collaborators 5. Actual Amount Requested 19370.00Narrative Description INTRODUCTION Internet Literacy is not just about how to point and click in a Web browser. In INLS 80 and INLS 181 (the courses offer nearly identical content at the undergraduate and graduate level), students learn much more. These courses provide skills to find, evaluate and produce Web content. Students learn about the history, the current status and the future of the Internet - arguably the most significant advance in human communication ever. They also gain an understanding of how the Internet and related technologies may be applied in a variety of organizational, social and cultural settings. The work proposed here is to make these UNC-CH courses available to more students at UNC-CH, as well as to students and potential students elsewhere in North Carolina. The format will be self-paced online distance learning modules, utilizing a variety of techniques and delivery methods. THE NEED At UNC-CH, CCI and related projects make it obvious that the role of the Internet and Internet-based resources for education is significant. Yet there are very few opportunities on campus for people to learn the fundamentals of Web page design, graphics, file transfer, and other concrete skills for the Information Age. Similarly, there are relatively few opportunities to discuss the evolution of the Internet, future Internet tools, and how to evaluate emerging services and products. INLS 80/181 offer such skills and concepts, but even with 8 class sections per calendar year there is not enough room in the classes to accept all interested students. Furthermore, not all students really require INLS 80/181 to achieve their goals. Some might benefit from shorter segments (for example, how to create an online resume, or the basics of Internet security). The SILS professional MS degrees, like other graduate and undergraduate degrees, would benefit from students who enter the degree program with sound Internet skills. THE AUDIENCE The project, if funded, will make a large component of INLS 80/181 available online. It will be available free of charge to anyone with Internet access. The focus, though, will be on preparing students in North Carolina for entering an academic degree program where Internet Literacy may be assumed or desirable. One group of potential students includes professionals who might be considering a MS degree in Information Science or Library Science from SILS. This group might include current professional librarians, school teachers, and others. By engaging the content of INLS 80/181 online, they will be better prepared, more interested, and more highly qualified to enter the MS degree program. Another primary group is potential undergraduates for any degree program (at UNC-CH or elsewhere). INLS 80/181 offers an excellent opportunity to create Web-based portfolios, online assignments, and search for information about careers and secondary education. THE PROJECT INLS 181 and INLS 80 already have substantial online notes, assignments, and other materials to ease the transition to self-paced modules (please view http://ils.unc.edu/inls80 and http://ils.unc.edu/inls181 for further details). Graduate students will work with SILS faculty to place additional material suitable for self-paced learning or small collaborative groups online (e.g., if a group of professionals wanted to work through the course material together). The content will be similar to the existing course, with assigned readings, projects, exercises and deliverables. This is not proposed as a general tutorial on a particular topic (for example, there are many tutorials on creating Web pages). Instead, it is a full course. People who use the course material will not actually submit assignments to the INLS 80/181 instructors or receive college credit. But they will be able to gain almost all of knowledge and skills they would from sitting in the class. Initial registration via a username will allow tracking of the number of people who use the course, and how far they get. Feedback will be sought for individual modules, and for the course as a whole. EVALUATION AND SUSTAINABILITY Partners will be solicited from among the principal SILS target audiences, but will also be sought from other constituencies. For example, school libraries and media centers, corporate information centers and public libraries may all have a need for Internet Literacy training for their staff. Among other populations, some community colleges, high schools or other UNC institutions that do not have an Internet Literacy course may choose to utilize some or all of the online materials. The sustainable component will be to design online content for easy periodic update as the course progresses during regular semesters. In INLS 80/181, new texts are selected virtually every year. Assignments change, and of course the substance and the nature of the Internet is constantly evolving. By working initially to develop an updateable infrastructure for the online course, we will make it possible for the course to be current, useful and innovative for years to come. Graduate assistants will work with faculty to translate existing course notes and lecture materials to online formats). Over two semesters (Fall '99 and Spring '00) faculty and GAs will work to developing content and tune it with input from on-campus students in INLS 80/181. The course will be deployed in early form in January 2000, then updated significantly to a finished product (but a product in process) during Summer 2000. CONCLUSION This project will build significantly on the work funded in Spring 1999 by the Steering Committee. That project resulted in new multimedia conferencing equipment, cameras and software for use in cross-institutional doctoral seminars. That equipment will be utilized for the work proposed here, and additional equipment and GA support will make it possible to include a variety of media for the online course, including Web pages, discussion forums, automatically-graded quizzes, audio and video broadcasts of lecture components, and interactive chatting. The existing SILS courses for Internet Literacy are very well received, but are not accessible to a wide audience. In spite of the proliferation of online content of all types, there are no other free self-paced Internet Literacy courses comparable to full University courses available anywhere that the investigator could find. By supporting this proposal, the Distance Education Steering Committee will make high-quality classroom-grade education available to prospective graduate and undergraduate students, as well as to non-students or non-traditional students across the state. BUDGET FORM
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Instructional Technologies Development. Academic Technology & Networks. |