Publications on the subject of library advocacy conclude that students with access to good-quality library materials as well as qualified professional help perform better. A 2011 School Library Journal article by Keith Curry Lance and Linda Hofschire made it very clear that there is a positive relationship between having a librarian on staff and student achievement as measured by standardized tests. The article was the result of what the authors themselves describe as "a groundbreaking study using data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to document the impact of librarian layoffs on fourth-grade reading scores between 2004 to 2009." It is one of several dozen articles all concluding the same thing: that students do better in a resource-rich environment with regular exposure to reading materials and the guidance of a librarian, and not just in the realm of instilling literacy skills in elementary students (Lance and Hofschire 2012; Lance and Kachel 2018; Oatman 2006). Presumably, we must conclude that virtual-education students would benefit from the presence of library staff in their learning environments as well, but librarians are not embedded in virtual-learning environments, at least not yet. That's about to change! This is a critical time for school librarians to lend expertise and leadership in the ecosystem of virtual education.
Virtual education has the advantage of being able to deliver course content regardless of location, which makes it seem ideal for students in rural areas who want classes their local district can't provide; for students with disabilities that hinder participation in a traditional setting; or for students with other considerations such as athletic competitions and theatrical performances. Credit-recovery is a driving factor as well: if a student failed a course in his or her own school, he or she can retake it for credit at a virtual institution, either in the summer or during the regular year, in order to make up the credit and graduate on time. An increasingly common phenomenon is for students to participate in their virtual courses during the academic day in a classroom set aside for the purpose within their own schools. A single room can be home to students taking classes in world languages, mathematics, and humanities simultaneously.
The late twentieth and early twenty-first century saw an explosion in online courses. At first, online or virtual education was primarily the purview of colleges and universities, but schools in the United States and worldwide have realized the potential of offering online education to middle and high school students, and even to students in the primary grades. According to Darren Samuelsohn in an article written for Politico in 2015, during the 2013-2014 school year, 100,000 students up to 12th grade were enrolled full-time in a virtual school, and at least 5 million took at least one class. In five states, taking an online course is a graduation requirement, on the assumption that students will need to be prepared to tackle an online course in college.
Florida is one such state. The Florida Virtual School (FLVS) is the oldest of the state-based virtual schools but has expanded past its original mission and currently serves students in other states and around the world. The Virtual High School (VHS) was founded in 1996 "as part of a technology grant from the Department of Education," according to its own website.
There are no librarians listed on the staff of either institution. When contacted via email, the Virtual High School indicated that all course content was embedded within their online platform—any required materials such as readings or eBooks are included as part of the course registration. Florida Virtual School replied that students "are directed to use public library resources," and that learning to conduct and document research is woven into appropriate coursework such as English, thus becoming the task of the course instructor. The state of Florida provides access to the Florida Electronic Library via GeoIP, so that any user anywhere in the state can log in, regardless of whether the user has a library card or not. These resources are absolutely adequate to the needs of FLVS students, so long as they are doing their coursework within the state of Florida. If a student has access to the guidance of a librarian at his or her own school, or is able to work with a librarian at a branch, he or she receives the benefit of having a librarian's guidance. But what befalls a virtual learner who relies solely on the guidance of an instructor with expertise in a single discipline rather than an expert on teaching research and documentation?
Students enrolled in the Virtual High School reside across the nation and around the world. Consequently, there is no single state library designated to serve all of its students. A student in a state with adequately funded, high-quality online library resources has access to better materials than a student in a state without such riches; the potential for that disparity to negatively affect educational outcomes seems obvious. Or, at least it would if there were any sense that students in virtual-learning environments were truly being urged towards the resources at their disposal.
There are virtual-education consortia as well as standalone institutions like FLVS and VHS. In a consortium, member schools contribute courses taught by their own faculty and students can take classes from among those on offer, with credit granted by their home institution. In a class of twenty students taking a course offered by a consortium, the possibility exists that every student will be enrolled in a different home institution, some of which may have good libraries and adequate staff and some which may not. Disparity will exist in this arrangement too, despite the fact that many consortia are comprised of independent schools, which have tended to retain library staff at a much greater rate than public school districts.
So…whose library provides the materials for the course if the teacher elects to post materials to the course site? If a teacher at one school posts an article sourced from its own licensed library database on a course site that serves twenty students, is that in keeping with the original terms of the license if nineteen of those students are not actually enrolled at that school, or does it violate its terms?
I contacted several database vendors to ask about this very scenario and only EBSCO responded. EBSCO indicated that these students are considered "dual-enrolled," in the same way high school students can take college courses, so it is up to the enrolling institution to provide login credentials to access database materials. Consequently the task of managing those credentials has to fall to someone, since they should properly only exist for the duration of the enrollment, right? That seems like a lot of work for ensuring students can access the occasional article, especially in an environment where there may be no designated library staff member to manage it.
This is the critical moment, the very juncture at which we as a profession have an opportunity to demonstrate the value that librarians have to offer in the ecosystem of virtual education. My home institution, the Out-of-Door Academy, is a member of the Hybrid Learning Consortium (HLC), which is comprised of independent schools across the nation and around the world. HLC held a symposium at Out-of-Door in the spring of 2019, exactly in front of my desk in the student commons. Delegates from member schools were on our campus for two days of workshops and presentations, and during that time I was able to meet and talk to Dacel Casey, Director of Community Service and Global Programs and Middle & Upper School Library Media Specialist at Trevor Day School in New York, about issues related to providing library services in the virtual education environment. As we spoke, we began to realize that the HLC presents a singular opportunity to create a dynamic resource of open-access materials for both teachers and students, one that can set a precedent for other virtual learning institutions. If all the materials in the resource we create are open, then the problem of parity of access as well as potential violation of licensure terms disappears.
But as we all know, not all open-access materials are created equally. There exist dozens, even hundreds, of websites devoted to offering curated lists of links to free educational materials such as lesson plans, image galleries, historical overviews, biographies, and so on. Frequently, these links expire or become useless if their materials are not updated regularly.
What Dacel Casey and I intend, instead of creating yet another curated list of websites that may or may not be here by the time you read this, is to create a durable but changeable resource that becomes a tool for learning and building skills. There are a few rock-solid repositories of open resources that have withstood the test of time, such as the Library of Congress' free off-site databases, the HathiTrust's enormous catalog of digitized print works, and the Directory of Open Access Journals. But in addition to simply including these and pointing users towards them, we are actively seeking the input of HLC teaching faculty to develop the resource so that it supports their subject specialties, and above all, to offer instruction and guidance for students and teachers alike in how to best use it. This resource will provide the foundation of a research skills course that HLC can then offer to its own students. Courses like this exist at the college level, but there is no evidence that it is being done for younger students anywhere in the virtual-learning environment, and it can be argued that this is where it is most needed in order to help ensure college and career readiness. All students deserve the support of qualified library professionals, and the published literature clearly indicates that they perform better when they have good resources and help in using them. That should include those enrolled in virtual-learning courses as well.
Lance, Keith Curry, and Linda Hofschire. "School Librarian Staffing Linked with Gains in Student Achievement, 2005 to 2011." Teacher Librarian 39, no. 6 (October 2012): 15-19.
Lance, Keith Curry, and Linda Hofschire. "Something to Shout About: New Research Shows That More Librarians Means Higher Reading Scores." School Library Journal (September 2011): 28-33.
Lance, Keith Curry, and Debra E. Kachel. "Why School Librarians Matter: What Years of Research Tell Us: When Schools Have High-quality Library Programs and Librarians Who Share Their Expertise with the Entire School Community, Student Achievement Gets a Boost." Phi Delta Kappan (April 2018): 15.
Oatman, Eric. "Overwhelming Evidence: Now, There's a Surefire Way to Show How Libraries Make a Big Difference in Student's Lives." School Library Journal (January 2006): 56-59.
Samuelsohn, Darren. "Virtual Schools Are Booming." Politico (September 23, 2015). https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/09/virtual-schools-education-000227
The Virtual High School. https://vhslearning.org/
Entry ID: 2208178