The Case of Teacher-Librarianship by Distance Learning at the University of Alberta, Canada

Setting The Stage

Through the 1990s, the admissions to the accredited MLIS program held steady at approximately forty students annually. The school library education programs in the Department of Elementary Education did not fare as well. The numbers of students applying for the school library education programs (both the MEd route and the post-baccalaureate Diploma route) began to diminish in the early 1990s. There were a number of factors that combined to reduce the viability of what had always been a small niche program.

The initial impetus for developing an online program was the financial cutbacks of the 1990s in the K-12 education system in the Province of Alberta. Schools, when forced to cut their budgets, began to lay-off or re-assign non-classroom-based staff. Counsellors and teacher-librarians were particularly hard hit. The cutbacks exacerbated the impact of two other factors related to the number of positions for teacher-librarians: (1) a provincial school library policy that recommended but did not mandate particular types or levels of school library staffing, and (2) a school-based budgeting system that delegated staffing decisions to the individual school level. Together, these factors resulted in a rapid decline in the number of students seeking admission to programs in teacher-librarianship.

For me, as the faculty member responsible for school library education at the University of Alberta, the only viable option appeared to be to increase the pool of applicants and thus the number of students enrolled in the Diploma and MEd programs through some sort of distance education. However, the cutbacks to the post-secondary system and the declining student registrations in school library education meant that it was very difficult to make a case for the Faculty or Department to allocate the resources needed to develop distance education programs.