Library-faculty collaboration using Wikipedia for learning and civic engagement

Wikipedia uses collaborative models of content creation and fosters a culture of collaboration. Understanding how it works and mastering editing skills often calls for partnerships between different members of the university community. Library-faculty Wikipedia-centered collaboration can open new opportunities to develop information and media literacy, student agency, and civic participation. This chapter shares faculty and librarians’ experience with using Wikipedia as a teaching tool as part of an initial pilot project aimed at using open educational resources. The library-faculty team from the American University of Central Asia worked together to use Wikipedia as a tool for collaborative learning and civic participation among students in sociology classes.

Literature Management and Scholarly Communication at USN

Background: The PhD course Literature Management and Scholarly Communication was established in 2019 through a library-faculty collaboration. This is the first accredited generic and interdisciplinary PhD course at this university, and it provides 5 ECTS credits. The course has participants from all our eight PhD programs, researching topics spanning from religion to robotics. Our main idea was that bringing PhD candidates from different programs together for such a course may add extra value in the form of enhancing communication and understanding across the disciplines. Methods: The study has a mixed methods design. A preliminary survey was conducted in 2017 to reveal the PhD candidates’ information needs, which provided a basis for planning the course content. To examine the candidates’ learning outcomes and further improvements for future courses, NVivo was used to analyse observations that were recorded during the course, in addition to the participants’ course essays and evaluation forms. Results: The 2017 survey had a response rate of 43% (n=91). More than 50% of the respondents expressed a need for library courses in literature searching, systematic reviews, research data management and the publishing process. The PhD course was designed based on these findings and has become a popular course with a total of 111 participants on four courses, of which 23% are international candidates and 7% are affiliated with other universities. The main finding was that several of the participants found the course surprisingly useful to their research and to their career plans. Discussion: Having a generic course for early-stage researchers from such a diversity of fields was challenging, and the article discusses several issues to consider for future courses. Most importantly, the prior knowledge was vastly different among the participants. This emphasizes the need for increased library-faculty collaboration to reach out to all PhD candidates in an early stage.

For the Benefit of All: Faculty-Led Undergraduate Research in the Humanities at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

This case study highlights the benefits of one example of humanities student-faculty collaboration at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, in which a critical editing project was enhanced by student contributions, while the students gained skills that encouraged retention and nurtured future success.