Articles

MOOCs to Watch

by Courtney Baron, Head Editor, INALJ Georgia

MOOCs to Watch

courtney1I work at a university and the School of Art recently went through a national director search. We invited four candidates to present and meet and greet the faculty, staff, and students. Nearly all of them mentioned MOOCs as a serious trend in higher education (yes, I know – no big surprise there) and discussed the possibility of implementing new courses at our university. It was great to hear this, because I’ve started researching potential MOOC classes to supplement my library and information science education. Librarians are generally familiar with the format of online courses, since many of our MLIS programs are offered online, but MOOCs take it to a whole new level. I took the liberty of arranging a list of interesting courses that are valuable to a LIS professional.

 MOOCs

 

Whew… this is by no means an exhaustive list, but it should give you a good idea of what’s out there. I’ll see you in class!

Naomi House

Naomi House, MLIS, is the founder and publisher of the popular webzine and jobs list INALJ.com (formerly I Need a Library Job) and former CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of T160K.org, a crowdfunding platform focused on African patrimony, heritage and cultural projects. INALJ was founded in October 2010 with the assistance of her fellow Rutgers classmate, Elizabeth Leonard. Its social media presence has grown to include Facebook (retired in 2016), Twitter and a LinkedIn group, in addition to the interviews, articles and jobs found on INALJ. INALJ has had over 21 Million page hits and helped many, many thousands of librarians find employment! Through grassroots marketing, word of mouth and a real focus on exploring unconventional resources for job leads, INALJ grew from a subscription base of 20 friends to a website with over 500,000 visits in one month. Naomi believes that well-sourced quantity is quality in this narrow job market and INALJ reflects this with many new jobs published daily. She has also written for the 2011, 2012 and 2013 LexisNexis Government Info Pro and many other publications in the past decade. She presents whenever she can, including serving on three panels at the American Library Association's Annual Conference in Las Vegas; as breakout presenter at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa; as a keynote speaker at the Virginia Library Association annual meeting; at the National Press Club in Washington DC; McGill University in Montreal, Canada; the University of the Emirates, Dubai, MLIS program and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Naomi was a Reference, Marketing and Acquisitions Librarian for a contractor at a federal library outside Washington, DC, and has been living and working in Budapest, Hungary and Western New York State. She spent years running her husband’s moving labor website, fixed and sold old houses and assisted her husband cooking delicious Pakistani food. She is preparing to re-enter the workforce and is job hunting. Her husband is now the co-editor of INALJ, a true support!  She has heard of spare time but hasn’t encountered it lately. She pronounces INALJ as eye-na-elle-jay. 

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