This work expands the literature and research focused on career change students enrolled in an online master's program by examining the literature regarding transitions, motivations, and advising support for career changers. Also studied are the motivations of career change students enrolled in two different online, synchronous graduate programs.…

This dissertation explored the retention of career change Library Science students in an online, professional master's program. This study specifically examined retention through student motivations for career change, levels of self-regulation, and the deemed usefulness of Student Affairs services. This work explored Library Science career change,…

Research methods education in LIS master's degree programs is facing several difficult questions: should a methods course be required, what content should be taught in that course, and what is the most effective mechanism for teaching that content. There is little consensus about what should be taught or how, but the American Library Association,…

In the face of a changing landscape of youth services, LIS education can push the field of librarianship forward by adopting research-based frameworks that are directly applicable to the profession. We combined the Connected Learning framework with Radical Change theory and Outcome-Based Planning and Evaluation (OBPE) to establish the structure…

The School of Information Science and Learning Technologies (SISLT) was created in 1997 at the University of Missouri (MU) as a result of a merger between the School of Library and Informational Science and the College of Education's program in Educational Technology. Within 6 years of the merger, SISLT became one of the largest graduate…

Blended education, which mixes elements of face-to-face and online educational delivery, can occur at the activity, course, program, or administrative level. This study examined the use of student blogs to test the benefits of course-level blended educational delivery for LIS students enrolled in a face-to-face course. Data collected from…

This study explores how factors relating to fully online Master of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) students' connectedness with peers and faculty may impact their professional identity development as library and information studies professionals. Participants include students enrolled in a fully online MLIS degree program in the…

This paper presents a large scale study of online MLIS students (n = 910), who completed at least one online course and were enrolled in 36 of the 58 ALA-accredited MLIS programs in Canada and the United States. The results indicate that the typical student is female, White, lives in an urban setting, and is in her mid-30s. Online students were…

Focus groups captured 35 adults' perceptions of an online library and information science master's program. Analysis of results using adult learning theories resulted in 10 recommendations for online courses. Student/instructor and student/student interaction was absent in theories but a key element in distance learning. (Contains 11 references.)…