The First All-Virtual Library School

Debra Kachel hopes that fives years from now, when a school district needs to find a new media specialist, one of the first places they'll call is Pennsylvania's Mansfield University. If you haven't heard about the library program at this small, bucolic state university, you're probably not alone: the program just opened its doors in the fall of 2000. But in that short time, it's enrolled about 120 students and earned a title as the nation's first completely online library school.

The program, which awards a master of education degree in school library and information technologies, rather than an MLS, was created largely to ease the growing shortage of school librarians. Most certified teachers, Mansfield's target audience, live nowhere near the school. Yet three recent graduates can already boast of earning master's degrees without having stepped foot on campus.

Mansfield is about to make another mark. As part of a $356,000 grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, the university will offer a four-week summer program for school principals, whose knowledge and confidence in school librarians is considered crucial to media specialists' success. The money will also be used to start a scholarship program to attract certified teachers, particularly minority groups, as well as those living far from a library school. Studies have shown that most administrators learn almost nothing in graduate school about school libraries. But ironically, it's the principal who controls not only how much a school spends on its library but how its teachers view the library and work with its librarian. Principals who complete the course will receive a $500 stipend to help create a better library at their own schools.

"If you have a principal who sees the facility as a holding tank for study hall students or a place to send disruptive students for a time-out, you have a problem," says Kachel, a leader among Pennsylvania's media specialists.

Kachel and other notables in the Pennsylvania school library community masterminded the Mansfield program, which is not accredited by the American Library Association (ALA). Its director, Doris Dorwat, is the former chief of the media services division at the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Kachel says the program's main attraction is that it was designed by media specialists for media specialists. "One of the things we had found out in the research is that a number of people who come out of some of the library science schools are ill-prepared to handle a school library teaching situation," Kachel says. That's why Mansfield's instructors have extensive school library experience and include recognized figures such as Joyce Valenza, a technology expert active in ALA, and Carrie Gardner, chair of ALA's Intellectual Freedom Roundtable.

The majority of Mansfield's graduate courses count as three credits, with each credit costing $282 for in-state students and $390 for out-of-staters. To earn a master's degree, students must complete at least 32 credits. As for students' grades, they're based primarily on written assignments, with some instructors also evaluating participation in "forums," or threaded e-mail discussion groups.

Kachel spoke with SLJ about the library program, what principals will learn from it, and how the school plans to recruit them. For information on Mansfield's scholarship program, go to library.mnsfld.edu/Scale/home.html. Information on the school's library program can be found at library.mnsfld.edu.

What inspired you to start the nation's first and only all-virtual library school?

Mansfield University is in the north central part of Pennsylvania. School officials recognize that they are in the middle of nowhere, not close to any major city, and that students today like to go to universities closer to larger urban areas, where they have a lot of activities. The officials realized that they needed to go to the students. That's why they were very receptive when we approached them about four years ago to develop a completely online master's program for library science students.

How did you develop the program and the curriculum?

The beauty of the program was we could start from scratch. There were no library science professors to deal with. There was no one embedded in certain curricula that they had written or courses that they had done. Early on, we decided we only wanted to develop a program for school library media specialists. So we took Information Power as our Bible. There were about five or six of us who sat down and said, "If we wanted to teach Information Power really well to teachers, what 10 courses would we pull from all this material?" Once we had the courses outlined, then we looked around to find who we thought were the most knowledgeable people in those areas to write the courses.

When will the first batch of scholarship students and principals start enrolling?

The scholarship students can actually enroll this summer. But the principals' program will not be offered until the summer of 2003. So we're going to develop it this summer and test it with a few guinea pigs. By next summer, we hope to enroll approximately 30 principals.

How does Mansfield plan to target principals to participate in the program?

What we are saying to applicants for the scholarship money is that if you can get your building principal to sign up, then you will receive a higher consideration for the scholarship money. In addition, when the principal completes the summer online program, he or she will receive $500 for professional development activities or resources to improve their school library program. We're hoping that between those two things, the push from the scholarship applicant and the enticement of $500 at the end, we'll get principals to sign on.

What can a principal expect to gain from the four-week program?

The summer online program will consist of four modules. Each of those modules will be mounted on the Web, on the Jones Knowledge software that we use for the rest of our programs. Basically, there will be information there about what you're going to learn in this module and then there's a lecture. We will also have a short video that accompanies each of the four modules. Then we're going to send them readings and books where needed. We will also have a threaded e-mail discussion as part of each of the four modules. And we'll have experts in the field monitor the discussions each week and respond. For example, one week the topic will be how to build a school library collection. I have asked Dan Fuller of the Follett Software Company, who is a former school librarian and is well versed in collection development, to monitor that session and respond to the principals. What we're trying to do is build a little cohort group of principals, talking to each other and sharing their problems and concerns.

Name some of the other lecturers.

I have asked David Loertcher from San Jose State University to moderate one of the sessions, and Gary Hartzell, who is a professor in the educational administration department at the University of Nebraska, to moderate another (see Hartzell's new monthly column, "Building Influence "). The fourth one, I haven't nailed down yet. But I am trying to find the kind of people that have a background in administration that principals will identify with.

Can you explain the individual modules in more detail?

I looked to Information Power as my guide and decided that the first module will be an overview of the qualities of a good school library media program. I'm going to actually lift things about that right from Information Power .

For the second module, we will talk about the school library collection and discuss print versus electronic resources, a big issue. There are principals out there who believe that once you have access to the Internet, you don't need a physical print collection. So, we're going to dispel some of those myths. We'll also talk about budgeting, and give them some budgeting guidelines.

The third module will be on the instructional program. There are still principals out there who believe that librarians shouldn't teach and [who wonder] what we are supposed to teach. I really want to make them aware of some model information skills and what a written library curriculum looks like. I'd like to emphasize the issue of collaboration with teachers and how a principal can support that. I also want to give them some tools that they might be able to take back to their schools if they have no written information skills curriculum.

The last module is on evaluation. How do you evaluate a program? And consequently, how do you evaluate a school library media specialist? Most principals have no idea how to do that.

What's been the response to your program since opening in the fall of 2000?

We have turned students away every single semester except this past fall. This past fall, we bumped up the number of courses that we were offering. We initially offered four courses at a time. Now, we're offering six.

How long does it take to get a degree?

We have three students who nearly killed themselves getting through the program in a year. But normally, if they are working full time, we think three years is a good way to do it. That means you only take one course at a time while you're working, and you take two or three in the summer. You can go through at a pretty fair pace in three years. If you want to do it in less, you'd have to go full time in the summer, which some people do. But it's a very daunting task, because our courses require our students to be self-learners and self-motivated. We have had a few students who couldn't do that. They really struggled or they dropped out. Anyone coming into the program thinking this is a quick way to get a degree, soon finds out that's not true. It's a lot of work.

What have you learned so far?

We do extensive interviewing with our students each semester, and what we've found is that they love the format. They like being able to take this program without having to leave their homes. Now, within the courses, they must go into school libraries and do some practical assignments. So it's not that they never leave their homes. But the fact that they don't have to drive hours to get to a library science school is what they appreciate most.

The second thing that we hear is that they love having school library practitioners as teachers, because they can e-mail them questions about their current situations, and these people have enough experience to give students some really good advice.