The academic library – a hidden stakeholder - in the age of MOOCs

Abstract

The involvement of the University Library at FernUniversität in Hagen in the production process of the cMOOC "Discover the Island of Research" (#ExIF13) makes it possible to address the question of the role of the academic library in the age of MOOCs on the basis of practical experience. In recent years academic libraries have experienced a change in their scope of tasks and services as a result of digitizing and the digital shift. Is this experience with the digitizing of content sufficient for an academic library to claim business as usual for the forthcoming digitizing of teaching (MOOCs)? All the requirements made by the ExIF13 hosts (Sebastian Vogt and Markus Deimann) of the University Library Hagen (Dirk Eisengräber-Pabst) concerning the individual production steps could be located conceptually in the classic spectrum of tasks of an academic library. However, there were a few challenges to be mastered in the practical (and here especially technical) implementation. While the scope of tasks of the embedded librarian, teaching information literacy, could be implemented quickly, there was a lack of suitable repositories, search engines and metadata concepts for the cross-institutional handling of audio-visual (education) contents. For the role of the library in the age of MOOC, this means that it possesses full theory and conceptual potential as a service partner for producers, teachers and learners. It can thus be considered a hidden stakeholder.