The present work describes an experience of educational innovation in a university context. Its aim was to determine the relationship between students’ frequency of use of online self-assessment with feedback and their final performance on the course, taking into account both learners’ motivation and perceived usefulness of these resources for their learning process. Furthermore, we studied the relationship between metacognitive variables and academic performance and/or execution of activities aimed at learning the course content. To this end we created self-assessment material with the Hot Potatoes educational program and assessed the degree to which students took advantage of the tool, their satisfaction with it and their perceived knowledge, using ad hoc questionnaires. The results indicate better academic performance in those students that use interactive self-assessment. It should be pointed out that even students with low motivation levels made use of this teaching tool. Finally, a relationship was found between metacognitive variables and students’ effort and performance. We discuss the need to include self-assessment in the curriculum, with a view to improving students’ metacognitive knowledge.

Online self-assessment with feedback and metacognitive knowledge

This paper discusses the major issues confronting the successful adoption and sustained use of online learning in higher education within the Australian context. The paper argues that four main issues which universities must deal with to achieve maximum potential from online learning technologies are: the establishment of cost-effective practices; the achievement and maintenance of quality in online learning delivery; ensuring access and equity in the delivery of programs; and establishing practices which can enable online learning to be sustained and to grow as a mainstream activity in university teaching and learning. While these issues are suggested as discrete entities, it is recognised that there is considerable overlap in the influencing factors and in the strategies and processes by which they can be overcome. The paper describes and proves exemplars of a number of strategies for dealing with the issues in ways which provide the means to support and sustain quality online learning programs within universities and in the broader educational context. These include: the development of proactive programs to improve teacher expertise in the design, development and delivery of online teaching; the use of programs to support and maintain student readiness; the need to provide adequate technology infrastructure to support the programs; and the use of strategies supporting the design and development of online programs based on the customisation and reuse of learning objects.

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Assuring the quality of online learning in Australian higher education

/pdf/data-collection-and-cost-modeling-for-library-circulation-1s3ef670xc.pdf

Data Collection and Cost Modeling for Library Circulation Systems.

Automated systems of book order and circulation control using an IBM 1620 Computer are described as developed at Oakland University. Relative degrees of success and failure are discussed briefly.

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Automated Book Order and Circulation Control Procedures at the Oakland University Library

ANSWERS TO A question sheet sent early in 1954 to fifty libraries indicate that the trend toward recognition of personnel administration in the organizational structure, which began some time ago, is continuing. The inquiry was sent to the larger public libraries, chiefly those having more than ten branches, and to the largest university libraries. Seventy per cent of those solicited for information returned the question sheet. Of these, 57 per cent reported that their personnel administration duties are now assigned to a special officer. Undoubtedly, this is an increase over what might have been discovered ten, or even five, years ago. Because recognition of personnel administration as a separate function is relatively recent, library literature on the subject is not yet extensive nor profound, as the evaluated bibliography published last year sh0ws.l Many librarians now realize that their traditional feeling of being different from workers in other fields has been an erroneous one. This realization has led librarians to a study of the personnel literature from other vocations where more has been done to develop personnel methods than in libraries. Such study has led them to a fuller recognition of personnel administration as a separate area of administrative endeavor, an area which requires special techniques of the persons performing it, and, in the larger libraries, special offices and officers to perform it.2 Difficulties as well as help have come from study of the personnel literature of business and industry. Librarians were too inexperienced in personnel administration practices to assimilate their reading at first. Also, the unfamiliarity of the situations described and of the terminology seems to have annoyed them. Bringing into libraries personnel workers from business and industry, as has been done in a few places, may have aggravated the annoyance instead of furthering

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/5565/librarytrendsv3i1i_opt.pdf?sequence=1

Ralph E. McCoy

Papers

Personnel Administration for Libraries.

Computerized circulation work: a case study of the 357 data collection system

Tools for the teacher

Open Court a Centennial Bibliography, 1887-1987