by Dr. Rebeca Peacock
The current era of higher education teaching and learning has shown the necessity of online instruction across all departments at the university, with librarians needing to pivot between in-person and online instruction (Stoffle et al., 2020) and lack pragmatic backgrounds in how to do so (Bewick & Corrall, 2010; Houtman, 2010; Shank & Dewald, 2012; Westbrock & Fabian, 2010). In library science programs in North America and abroad, courses that cover instructional theory and practice are merely electives and not required of those seeking academic librarian positions (Bailey, E. C., 2010; Ducas et al., 2020; Julien, 2018; Saunders, 2015; Shonrock & Mulder; 1993; Sproles et al., 2008; Westbrock & Fabrian, 2010). During the COVID-19 pandemic, academic librarians, like other faculty, had to modify their instructional modalities, and many took to LISTSERVS to ask for advice on how to do so (Benjes-Small, 2020; Keller, 2020; Paul, 2020; Pierce, 2020). It became clear that there needed to be more readiness in academic librarians to meet the challenges of providing quality online instruction to students.
To find out what academic librarians would need to be proficient in providing online information literacy instruction, semi-structured interviews were used to collect data, as described by Gupta et al. (2004). Eighteen expert participants were selected using purposeful sampling based on the participants’ librarian title, experience with online teaching, and earned an advanced degrees in relevant disciplines. Interview transcripts were coded by the researcher to derive 24 competencies that the experts being interviewed validated. The validation process included serval rounds of triangulation between the experts that led to edits to some of the competencies. Experts also identified 7 barriers that may make it difficult for academic librarians to adopt these competencies and provide online library instruction successfully. Overall, this research provides a method for academic librarians to identify gaps in their knowledge, skills, and attitudes in meeting student learning needs in online library instruction.
Dr. Peacock is an instructional designer working with an Online MBA program. She is a former academic librarian who focused on online library instruction.