The classes ended on Thursday, August 9, although all of the assignments are not due until the end of the day on Monday, August 13. The classes have been wonderful to teach and the students have learned much about Digital Libraries, Academic Libraries, Digital Information Services, and User Education. A program of four courses in nine week is ambitious and rigorous, and both the teachers and students have benefited from the experience, although all are tired. The last week of classes was filled with impressive group and individual academic presentations.
Also impressive were the applied products coming out of the classes. In the User Education five information literacy classes were designed in Moodle, an open source course management system. In the Digital Libraries course, a digital library was created within Greenstone from the medical library materials given to the class by Dr. Chien. Both products were demonstrated in the classes, and perhaps more importantly, in the subsequent workshops for practicing academic librarians, which followed the end of the classes.
This academic schedule was different from what I usually teach, and I learned some new techniques. With over 16 class sessions in each course, we could set up workshops in class more often than is usually possible with the traditional Simmons schedule. These workshops improved the quality of the learning and the assignments, and permitted me to work with the students individually on their tasks. They were also fun to do.
The students had a week of no classes in the middle of their courses, while Patrick and I taught an IT workshop to the IT staff of the LRCs. The students worked hard during this week, and for them it was a welcomed break from class and a time to catch up. This week of no classes in the middle of the session was valuable for improving the quality of the work.
Because we were teaching in Vietnam, we did not have access to a network of guest speakers. So, we had only one guest speaker in the four courses. In the Academic Libraries course, Patrick invited Professor of Law Willajeanne McLean from the University of Connecticut Law School to present a lecture on two of her specialties, copyright and intellectual property rights, to the Academic Libraries class. The presentation was very illuminating, and included an explanation of intellectual property rights and copyright in Vietnam. Professor McLean is, coincidentally, married to Patrick?s brother, Michael, and was touring southeast Asia.
We used the Moodle open source, course management software as a pilot for our courses. Moodle turned out to be easy to learn, and we used it without difficulty. We used an instance of Moodle brought up by the GSLIS Tech Lab, on a server in Boston. Moodle supports more functions than Vista, the WebCT course management system used at Simmons, and the response time is faster. It is also organized in a more transparent way. Its simpler interface belies the complexity of the functions that are possible in Moodle. The Moodle server application software can be installed on WIN2003, the preferred server operation system in the LRCs, and on Linux. It is likely that both Greenstone and Moodle will be installed on servers in the LRCs, because both provide opportunities for sustainability, that is, making money for the LRCs.
Teaching two new preparations twice a week leaves little time for anything else, particularly if there are frequent assignments. Similarly, for the students, taking four courses, each of which meets twice a week, is a challenge. However, although the students say that they only survived, they in fact thrived. Patrick and I will miss them, their enthusiasm, their unfailing good humor, and their commitment to work.