International Collaboration in Student Library Instruction

This session which was jointly presented by Jiselle Maria Alleyne, Research & Bibliographic Instruction Librarian, Bermuda College and Denyse Rodrigues, Extended Library Services Librarian, Mount St. Vincent University, looked at the strategies, activities and tools used to deal with some of the challenges of delivering IL services to students at a distance. As with many universities in Canada, MSVU has a robust distance education programme and students enrolled at a small college in Bermuda are among the benificiaries of this programme.

After MSVU entered into the partnering arrangement with Bermuda College, it became apparent that the students at the college needed a great deal of help with understanding what resources and services were available to them through MSVU and on site. To meet this challenge, the two presenters embarked on a collaborative project to develop a library instruction programme which would make it relatively easy for students to learn about services and resources available to them through MSVU in particular. The various modules of the course were jointly delivered using the "Elluminate" distance education platform. Based on the feedback from faculty and students at the partner institutions, this international collaborative effort has been a huge success and Bermuda College which has distance education arrangements with a host of universities around the world is planning to use this model of trans-library cooperation for some of these other programmes.

As of now, only articles are sent from MSVU to the Bermuda location. It is expected that books will eventually be sent, although this is also expected to be a more costly proposition. I thought that it was remarkable that the presenters were able to pull off the course and the presentation successfully given the fact that their interaction up to two days before the presentation had been by phone and the web only.

As far as attendance at the session goes, I guess there were so many other "interesting" sessions going on at the same time and people felt more inclined to go to those sessions. However, based on the vigorous discussion that ensued among the, relatively, few attendees, it is clear that providing library services for the foreign student population whether on site or at a distance, is of crucical importance. As universities entice more and more foreign students to their doors in an effort to make up budgetary shortfalls through "differential" fees which are really very hefty, the need to pay more attention to this cohort, cannot be more pressing.