The most recent issue of Innovate, the Journal of Online Education, has an article by John Shank and Steven Bell called A_FLIP to Courseware: A Strategic Alliance for Improving Student Learning Outcomes (you’ll need to register with the site to be able to read it – it’s free). Basically this brief article discusses ways librarians should be working with faculty and course adminstrators (the folks who manage and build the course shells) to better integrate library information and services at the course level in the CMS. A few juicy quotes to pique your interest:
At the system level, simply creating a more obvious library presence through the addition of buttons that link to the library is an appreciated but ultimately inadequate gesture. Because the courseware systems constantly evolve, there will always be opportunities for new and innovative ways by which the library can be integrated across and throughout the system. For this reason librarians should have an ongoing role in the administration of the campus courseware system.
and
We anticipate that in the not-too-distant future, many library databases will allow search results to be generated as RSS feeds. When that is possible, a librarian could structure a database search that would feed the equivalent of a constantly updated subject bibliography into a specific course site. A faculty member could request that the librarian conduct a search related to a topic being discussed in class, and the RSS feed would deliver a regular stream of articles related to that topic for student awareness. Working with faculty members, librarians could also capture RSS feeds from news sources and provide students with highly customized packets of news related to their course topics from thousands upon thousands of Internet resources. These are just some of the ways that integrating new and developing technologies such as RSS or social networking software into courseware promotes a collaborative approach to connecting students to the highest quality information resources.
There are a few good examples and links in the article, so if this is a new concept for you it’s a very good read. I remember Rebecca Hedreen blogged about many of these same ideas about a year ago…