SOIS Faculty to Receive Excellence in Online Teaching Awards

UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies (SOIS) Professor Hope Olson and Senior Lecturer Steven Miller have each been recognized with WISE 2006 Excellence in Online Teaching Awards. Determined by students voting for faculty at an institution other than their own, from among library and information studies schools in the WISE Consortium, these honors validate the dedication of Olson and Miller and demonstrate the success of a continuing effort of SOIS and the WISE Consortium to offer high-quality graduate education online.

Steven Miller offered an online section of his Metadata course, a course he has taught several times in semester-long terms and in shorter, intense workshop formats. He promotes a collaborative, cumulative learning process by facilitating individual and group projects that link principles and concepts with applications, which lead to final course projects. A nationally-known metadata expert, Miller reports that he learns new things with and from students every time he teaches. One of Miller’s students said that the Metadata course was “… the most fun course I’ve ever taken and the one from which I’ve learned the most. Course material is excellently organized and course exercises imaginatively presented.”

The course that garnered Hope Olson the award was her “Feminism, Librarianship, and Information.” An online seminar, it relied on student interaction for its success, but provided much inspiration from a variety of experts – whom Hope described as “virtual guests” – including two SOIS faculty (Maria Haigh and Elizabeth Buchanan), Sue Searing from the University of Illinois, Roma Harris from the University of Western Ontario, Katarina Blomqvist from KVINFO, the Danish national women’s library, and Jenny Radloff, the Africa Coordinator of the Association for Progressive Communications Women’s Networking Support Programme in South Africa. With this global perspective, the course truly took advantage of the interactivity of the medium. The highlight of the course was a collaborative research paper written by Olson and all the students and delivered by Katarina Blomqvist at a refereed conference on women and information held in Mexico City. A student from the course said, “Dr. Olson single-handedly made the course the best distance education experience I have had to date. Her course was thoroughly engaging and it was over much too soon."

Olson’s and Miller’s courses were two of eight so honored among 133 WISE courses that served 198 students in many U.S. states and some other countries in 2006. The consortium currently consists of thirteen leading schools of library and information studies with established online programs in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. The WISE (Web-based Information Science Education) Consortium has designed a collaborative distance education model to provide courses to its institutions’ students worldwide. According to the WISE website (http://www.wiseeducation.org/), the object is to increase the quality, access, and diversity of online education opportunities in the field.

Established in 2004, the Consortium has offered more than 100 courses as varied as information economics, subject analysis and thesaurus construction, biodiversity informatics, legal resources, information ethics, XML for libraries, and topic maps. MLIS programs in the Consortium can now provide students with specialized classes that are not currently represented in their own schools or which cannot be offered on a frequent basis. Faculty from WISE schools can participate in online and traditional training programs offered annually at two professional conferences and the institutions themselves also provide instructors with administrative, pedagogical, and technical support.

SOIS has offered hybrid and online courses since 1995 and its MLIS has been available entirely online since 1999, with its online courses being taught by the same instructors who teach them in classrooms. Taking advantage of the Internet and increasingly interactive courseware, SOIS has positioned itself as one of the oldest and the third largest online MLIS in the United States. Students from most of the fifty states and several other countries have participated in the program and contribute to the interactivity of the courses with their personal experiences in many different settings and to the global outlook of SOIS, which has long served an international student population.