Design for Learning: 21st Century Online Teaching and Learning Skills for Library Workers

Description/Abstract

Design for Learning: 21st Century Online Teaching and Learning Skills for Library Workers (D4L) was a continuing education program to enable library workers to transfer their in-person teaching skills to the online environment.

The objectives of the Design for Learning program were

for participants to be able to:

• Successfully transfer face-to-face teaching and learning skills and pedagogy to the online environment.
• Acquire new teaching skills/pedagogy for the online environment.
• Evaluate and gain experience with various platforms and tools for online teaching and learning.
• Understand the role of diversity (including cultural, ethnic, accessibility learning style, and generational) in online learning and make it an integral component of instructional design.
• Design and create online instruction and instructional materials.
• Practice teaching and learning online.

and for the program to:

• Establish a dialog among library workers regarding libraries as institutions of learning in the 21st century.
• Make project findings, materials, and best practices in online learning pedagogy available to the library community.

Participants in the program went through a series of 7 modules (most about 4 weeks long), culminating in a capstone project to develop a unit of online instruction for their library.

The first two cohorts went through the program between September 2015 and January 2017. A self-paced version of the program was available for free to library workers across the country via WebJunction.org from 2017-2024.

The content from all of the modules is made available as Open Educational Resources (OER) in the hope that it can be useful both to those who wish to learn about these topics and to those who may want to adapt and update the resources for their own teaching.

Materials available from each module include videos, lessons (which include video transcripts, discussion prompts, and quiz questions), slides, a syllabus, resource guides, and an instructional design workbook (which includes reflection questions, activities, and an instructional design plan template).