May 1, 2000
Richard J. Cox, Chair
Paul Conway
Susan Davis
Tim Ericson
Susan Fox, ex officio
David Haury
Bill Landis
Reneta Webb, SAA Education Officer
Wilda Logan Willis
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. The SAA Council established the Task Force on Continuing Education to evaluate and make recommendations regarding the future of the Society's education program and the position of an Education Officer. The Task Force deliberated through the Fall of 1999 and much of the Winter of 2000, culminating in a meeting in Chicago on March 10-11, 2000. The Task Force recommends a major shift in the Society's education program, primarily supporting a move from offering basic workshops to offering online courses. This report describes the change of focus, the cost factors related to online course offerings, the support of an Education Officer position, and the matter of educational goals and their ongoing evaluation. A number of appendices of data have been provided for the use of Council in its deliberations and reflecting information the Task Force considered and/or generated.
CHANGING THE FOCUS OF THE SAA CONTINUING EDUCATION PROGRAM. The Task Force recommends that the Society shift its education program focus to deal with critical and challenging continuing education issues. In order to accomplish this objective, the Task Force recommends that the Society do the following:
Develop the means to help all individuals in the records professions better determine their education needs and identify where and how they can meet their education and training needs. The Society needs both to recognize that it cannot meet the needs of all members of the archival profession and that many other venues and groups have emerged that can provide basic and remedial training. The Society needs to focus on all other educational objectives, better reflecting the experience and education of its membership. Developing the means to do this suggests the Society helping to develop and support a clearinghouse of information where individuals can go to find training and education opportunities (from basic, entry training workshops to comprehensive graduate education programs). The Society's online education directory and publications catalog already represent a substantial part of such a clearinghouse and the Society's support of both continuing education and Masters in Archival Studies guidelines provides a foundation for such an objective. The Society's good working relationship with regional archival associations, state archives and historical societies, and other organizations providing continuing education is another strength that the Society can draw on for accomplishing this objective. Developing a closer relationship with these groups not only recognizes the present reality of archival continuing education, but it creates the possibility of helping the Society to play a creative role in improving continuing education and to be more strategic with its own objectives and resources.
Stress the needs of the changing parameters of the Society's membership, re-focusing its education program to support archivists and other records professionals who possess substantial graduate education and/or experience. As recent evaluations of the Society's membership have discovered, the members are getting older, better educated, more experienced, and better paid. The Society, while concerned with the overall state of the archival profession, needs to focus its education program on the particular needs of these kinds of better-educated and more experienced professionals. This is especially important as graduates of MA/MLS/MAS programs represent a new breed of 'early career archivists' needing challenging and critical continuing education offerings. Such a focus will not only assist the Society to use its limited resources more strategically, but it will help the Society to nurture the leadership of the field. These kinds of objectives are part of the original, historical foundations of the Society.
Work with the people and key groups and partners who train archivists and other records professionals. Over the past twenty years or more, the number of people and groups interested in the education of records professionals has grown substantially. There are literally hundreds of potential players in the training of records professionals, from professional associations to colleges and universities to consulting groups to informal working alliances of professionals. The Society now has the opportunity to be more strategic in educational offerings by working with these individuals and groups both to develop educational objectives and to deliver training. The Society can also play a leadership role in setting education agendas and in providing tools, from traditional publications to online courses, for the training of records professionals. This more strategic role also provides the opportunity to challenge certain records creators, such as corporations, to provide better care for their archival records. National associations, such as the Society, are the best (and, in some cases, the only) groups to take such a leadership role.
Stress critical and challenging areas in professional education. There is no denying the many rapid changes in society, organizations, information technologies, and recordkeeping systems affecting the modern archivist and records manager. A key to any agenda for professional continuing education must be the ability of the discipline to create and support the means to provide education equipping records professionals to cope with and solve the modern challenges. The Society must be able to offer excellent training in emerging techniques, such as represented by Encoded Archival Description and digital libraries. The Society needs to target critically important sectors creating records, such as is represented by corporations. And the Society must be able to assist the profession to work on larger issues through education, such as represented by the issues generating from the archiving of electronic mail and Web sites. This objective is probably the most important responsibility for the Society, and the role it might best be able to play in the broader profession.
While some of the above objectives can be met through the traditional means of short-term, onsite workshops — the norm for the Society's education program — the Society needs to refocus the main thrust of its education program toward more comprehensive courses offered in an online environment.
THE SOCIETY'S NEW EDUCATION FOCUS: ONLINE COURSES
The Task Force believes that the year 2000 presents an opportune moment to reorient its education program — now directed primarily but not exclusively toward SAA members — to take advantage of the rapidly maturing technology of distance education.
Since its inception, SAA's continuing education programs have relied nearly exclusively on the workshop format. Education specialists define the workshop as "a relatively short-term, intensive, problem-focused learning experience that actively involves participants in the identification and analysis of problems and in the development and evaluation of solutions." They contrast the strengths and limitations of the workshop with other formats, including seminars, institutes, and in particular short courses, which are abbreviated, more focused versions of the classes typically found in colleges and universities. Designed to update or deepen the knowledge of those in a particular field, the expert dominates the sessions because the short course focuses on communication and on acquisition of information within a short time." See Appendix One for a description of the workshop format.
A careful shift over a two to three year period from a nearly exclusive focus on one- and two-day workshops to delivering challenging short-courses in an online environment has at least four distinctive advantages for the Society.
Educational Goals. Because distance education is a relatively new phenomenon, SAA has the opportunity in adopting the format to make a clean break with its past efforts and define its educational goals clearly for participants. As its online program develops, SAA can move away from the simple ideas of "basic" or "advanced" offerings to a multi-faceted definition of "challenging" that emphasizes the respective role of the learner, the teacher, the content, and the format. SAA may need to target its offerings to members new to a given topic and attempt to assemble participant groups that are homogeneous in terms of familiarity with a given topic. SAA will probably need to recruit experienced teachers or train them in teaching methodologies and equip them with techniques for generalizing from the particular.
Economics. There is a compelling economic argument that supports the aggressive development of online course offerings. The long-standing goal of economic self-sufficiency notwithstanding, SAA's educational program has depended on grant funds for development and has always run a significant deficit when managed without the benefit of soft money sources. The Task Force developed a sequence of income and expense models for one-day workshops, two-day workshops, and online courses. The three models demonstrate that conclusively that SAA will most likely never be able to balance income and expenses if it relies exclusively on one- and two-day workshops. SAA would have to provide 32 one-day courses per year with an average of 22 people paying $375 per course in order to break even. SAA would have to provide 12 two-day courses per year with an average of 22 people paying $750 per course in order to break even. This price structure is outside the bounds of most SAA members; the pace of program development, especially in domain of one-day workshops, is likely outside the capability of the SAA office and its cadre of instructors.
In the online environment, SAA's overhead costs drop dramatically since there is no need to support instructor travel, local technology costs, and course support materials. Similarly, the opportunity for increased enrollment and higher course fees increases because participants do not need to incur travel costs. In order to break even, SAA needs to provide only eight online courses per year with an average of 50 people paying $375 per course.
See Appendix Two for the details on the economic models.
Relevancy. Educational surveys of SAA members have consistently shown that SAA members want and need educational offerings on pressing current topics that contain state-of-the art information. The Task Force believes that SAA's online educational program should identify cutting edge content and strive for deep coverage of the subject matter, even if this means risking criticism for favoring the trendy over the tried-and-true.
Technology Leveraging. In a recent survey of SAA members, technology-oriented training surfaced as a principal need across all categories of survey respondents. Because online courses are by nature technologically centered, the format provides the opportunity to marry the medium and the message; the content of the course and the mechanism of its delivery can be intimately entwined. Additionally, the online environment allows SAA to take maximum advantage of the interpersonal networking capability that is the very essence of the Internet.
In the short-run, the distinctive advantages to the Society may be partially offset by challenges that will require the Society to devote sufficient time, resources, and focused energy to program development, implementation, and evaluation.
Expectations. SAA members may need to abandon (over time) their expectation that SAA will continue to provide basic workshops and introductory-level training that either compensates for the lack of formal archival education or provides refresher information for seasoned professionals. SAA will need to encourage members to find basic workshops in other venues, including regional archival associations, by forming educational alliances with the regionals.
Startup. Startup costs will be high. SAA will need to invest in its technology and network infrastructure (servers, storage systems, redundant network connections, etc.), the creation of course materials, the recruitment and training of instructors, publicity, pilot programs, and initial evaluation. Additionally, SAA will need to plan on coping with declining income from traditional workshops as energy shifts to creation of online content.
Instructor Approach. The mindset and commitment of instructors may need to move away from a tendency toward canned presentations, not fully formulated content, and significant variety in the level of interactivity between instructor and participants to a more rigorously developed content that is closer to the cutting edge, more interactive, and more amenable to regular updating.
Technology Limitations. The technology of distance education is not fully developed. Network connections can be faulty and interactivity may be limited by the choice of technologies that are commonly available rather than state-of-the-art. Participants in distance education programs, whether they take the form of online courses or video teleconferencing, tend to complain about the impersonal nature of the medium and the limitations that private study on the Internet place on interpersonal networking. SAA must understand the technological limitations of distance education and online courses and take measures to offset these limitations wherever possible.
SAA's transition to a distance education model that takes maximum advantage of emerging information technologies will not be easy. The following are the Task Force's recommendations for easing the transition.
THE SOCIETY'S EDUCATION OFFICER. The Education Officer position dates back to the early-1980s and the Society's receiving a National Historical Publications and Records Commission grant. The original concept of the position was to have it become self-supporting through revenue generated by workshop offerings and the selling of educational materials that could be used by others for training purposes. The individual, generally an experienced archivist, filling the Education Officer position in its early manifestations served as the resident archival expert on the Society staff. More recently, education experts have filled the Education Officer slot.
In evaluating the data assembled related to archival continuing education and the Society, the Task Force has determined that the Education Officer has been forced to play a role that is too broadly defined, ranging from Society staff support to trying to direct a continuing education program with responsibilities from basic to advanced workshops and liaison with other education provided from regional associations to graduate education programs.
The Task Force recommends that the Education Officer position be continued, and that the position be filled by an education expert who can best carry out the new focus (described above) on critical and challenging continuing education issues. The Education Officer needs to assume the following responsibilities:
Steering the Education Program. The Education Officer needs to stress the role of guiding the education program to meet the critical and challenging continuing education issues. This requires an individual who can learn about the nature of these issues and develop venues for meeting such needs. Much of the responsibility of the newly defined Education Officer would be devoted to developing, coordinating the offering, and evaluating on new intensive online courses. This responsibility will also include playing the lead role in securing development funds for the online courses.
Advocating the Education Program. Another significant responsibility for the Education Officer will be that of coordinating continuing education offered by the Society with that offered by another education providers such as regional associations and colleges and universities. The Education Officer will need to be both a liaison to these other educational providers as well as a resource person for Society members and others interested in training for archival work. This role might also involve developing and supporting a more active clearinghouse about education and training, but this depends to a certain extent on the direction taken by the Council of State Historical Records Coordinators (COSHRC) and the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) following its National Forum on Archival Continuing Education (NFACE) project. At the least, the Education Officer will need to coordinate with whatever results from NFACE. All of this requires that the Education Officer have resources and time for marketing the program, especially to non-traditional audiences (e.g., the online basic electronic records course to the corporate world).
Publishing Materials for the Education Program. While the Education Officer has been connected to Society publications, the newly recommended focus expands the publishing role to include all media. The Education Officer would be responsible for the development and maintenance of online course materials (hopefully with the assistance of a newly created Webmaster position), along with the development of other publications ranging from CD-ROM products to traditional manuals and other publications. The Education Officer would work more closely with the Publications Officer in order to expand and market the Society's publications catalog. The Education Officer also would be responsible for identifying existing published (again in all media) materials that might be useful for new courses in the ever-changing priorities formed by seeking to meet the critical and challenging continuing education issues.
Teaching in the Education Program. Given that one of the new responsibilities for the refocused Education Program is to work with the people and key groups and partners who train archivists and other records professionals, the Education Officer will also need to assume a new role for teaching within the Society's education program. With the recommendation of the Task Force that the Education Officer continue to be staffed by an education expert, this individual could and should develop and teach workshops and courses enabling individuals with subject expertise to prepare new online, CD-ROM, and traditional venue courses. The Education Officer could also develop courses and workshops supporting the work of other education providers, especially regional associations, emphasizing such matters as workshop and course design, evaluation, development of learning objectives, and other educational issues appropriate to the expertise of an educational specialist.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES, EDUCATIONAL GOALS, AND EVALUATION. A critical component to the success of any future continuing education program or offerings are clearly articulated learning objectives, measurable goals, and meaningful evaluation. These components have been present only sporadically in the Society's past continuing education activities and, as a result, the Society itself has not been able to learn from past successes and failures. Furthermore, the Society has been unable to tap into such information to ensure the development of a robust continuing education program that both supports itself financially and responds to and successfully addresses the evolving continuing education needs of all facets of SAA membership.
In order to better secure the success of future efforts in the area of continuing professional education, the Task Force recommends that the Society do the following:
Articulate a coherent continuing education framework of which all SAA courses and workshops are components. Too often in the past the development of continuing education offerings has been at the instigation of willing members or in response to short-term opportunities. Several workshop presenters in the field of archival description, in an e-mail discussion prior to the meeting of this Task Force, expressed frustration at the varying levels of preparedness for their courses of the enrollees. They frequently face workshop participants who do not have the fundamental preparation in either archival theory or practice to successfully complete the workshop at the level at which it is being offered, or who sign up for a workshop because it is the only one being offered at a particular time and not because it meets their specific educational needs. Of course, this leads to workshops being taught to the lowest common denominator and, frequently and to the detriment of all enrollees, in the full range of material not being covered during the workshop. This situation, while perhaps in the short-term getting more bodies into seats at continuing education workshops, undermines the long-term success and health of the Society's continuing education program. The Education Officer should, in conjunction with CEPD, facilitate the development of a clear framework of courses and course progressions and, in conjunction with course and workshop developer(s), articulate minimum levels of professional practice and preparatory education for courses whose content is structured to challenge and educate mid-career archivists. As a part of a more robust and proactive clearinghouse function for archival continuing education offerings, discussed earlier in this report, the Society's continuing education web site should assist potential enrollees who aren't adequately prepared for a particular SAA course or workshop in finding a continuing education offering elsewhere that is more appropriate for their level of experience, academic preparation, and professional need.
Articulate clear, measurable learning objectives for each continuing education offering. As part of curriculum development for each continuing education course or workshop, the Education Officer must work with the course or workshop developer(s) to establish clear, measurable learning objectives. The Education Officer should be the catalyst for involving SAA committees, sections, and roundtables as appropriate in constructively critiquing these objectives as the syllabus for a course or workshop is developed. Learning objectives should be used in formulating advertising for the Society's continuing professional education offerings in order that members and others know prior to enrolling what they can expect to learn and, just as importantly, what they are expected to know coming into the course or workshop. For example, will enrollees in a particular course gain new techniques that they can apply to the solution of particular problems faced in their jobs, or will they have a less tangible but equally important increased understanding of a concept or theory that will generally enhance their practice as records professionals?
Separate development and instruction for the Society's courses and workshops. It has largely been past practice for the developer of a particular SAA workshop also to teach that workshop. There have been several successful instances in the area of description courses of a Íhand-off' from the original instructor to a new person, a model on which the Education Officer can build. In the future, the Society should fund the development of new courses and workshops absent the expectation that the developer will necessarily be the instructor. The Education Officer should take the lead in steering the development of new curricular offerings, and these should be reviewed by a group of members with appropriate expertise prior to being offered for the first time. Intellectual property in SAA courses and workshops must clearly belong to the Society and not individual content developers. Course content should be periodically evaluated by someone with appropriate expertise other than the instructor(s).
Develop standardized criteria for selecting instructors; evaluate instructors in a meaningful, on-going manner; and prepare multiple instructors for each course or workshop. The Education Officer should be responsible for organizing frequent evaluation of instructors above and beyond the collection of routine data on course evaluation forms. For online courses, this might involve periodically having an evaluator Ísit in' during an offering of the course. For workshops, this might involve the Education Officer randomly contacting workshop participants to administer an impartial evaluation interview. This data should be maintained by the Society's office in a confidential manner and, in redacted form, be available to instructors. Continuation of instructors annually should be based on a variety of evaluative data. If the Society hopes to market its continuing education courses beyond its immediate membership, it must be able to ensure the highest quality of instruction to course and workshop participants. Also, the Education Officer must be responsible for having back-up instructors prepared for each course and workshop so that the Society can market continuing education offerings based on demand and not on the availability of a particular instructor.
Develop a three-pronged evaluation scheme that will provide longitudinal data useful for the continuing development and refinement of a timely, responsive, challenging continuing education program to benefit both members of the Society, allied records professionals, and the organizations that employ them.
APPENDICES. The Task Force drew on a number of documents for its deliberations, and these have been assembled for perusal by the Council. The documents include:
Other documents, not included as appendices (because of their draft form, rough nature, or availability elsewhere), include the following:
All of this material is available in the SAA offices.
The differences between basic and advanced continuing education is an issue that appears to be important because surveys continue to show that archivists crave advanced continuing education, even while they acknowledge that basic training is important. For this paper, I have drawn on the background research I did for my Ph.D. dissertation in the late 1980s and my experience teaching workshops and seminars for professionals during the past ten years. I'll briefly review the thrust of some interesting literature on continuing professional education from the past couple of decades. Then I'll provide some definitions of the concepts of "basic" and "advanced" that may be of use to the Task Force. Ultimately, I think that we need to move away from a simple idea of "advanced" to a multi-faceted definition of "challenging" that emphasizes the respective role of the learner, the teacher, the content, and the format. I have listed a small number of relevant references and attached some definitions of educational formats from one of my all-time favorite articles on workshops.
Background
The decades of the 1970s and 1980s were the heyday of continuing education. Drawing on significant research funded in large measure by the federal government, theorists developed models of adult education and extended them to the realm of the professions. Practitioners developed formal programs and assessment theories and then forged partnerships between universities and professional associations across nearly all the major professions. By 1990 or so, the book had basically been written on continuing professional education, just in time for information technologies to shift the landscape under the rubric of distance learning. Today, very little new literature is emerging on traditional forms of continuing education (e.g., workshops, institutes, seminars, etc.). A cursory review of databases of education and library/archival literature shows a very strong focus on ways to use live video and Internet technology to reach professionals outside the academy. These articles do not necessarily focus on the content of continuing education and they tend to avoid altogether pedagogical questions, which is the principal issue underlying the problem of basic versus advanced education.
In 1980, Cyril Houle wrote the classic text in the field of continuing professional education. He married the basic idea of "life-long learning" from the adult education movement to the concept of professionalization and laid out a comprehensive argument on the responsibility of professionals to develop themselves. Houle lays out fourteen goals for continuing education and groups them into three categories: conceptual; individual performance; and collective identity. In the performance area, he distinguishes among mastery of theoretical knowledge, capacity to solve problems, and use of practical knowledge. For purposes of our deliberations, Houle feels strongly that it is the role of the graduate program in a university to provide basic competency. Continuing professional education builds and expands upon the basic foundation acquired prior to entry to the profession.
Writing five years later, Craig Scanlan also focused on the goals of professional continuing education. He suggested that the roles of the learner, the teacher, the content, and the process of education each depend on the orientation of the program in one of three different ways: acquiring content, problem solving, or self-actualization. He then developed an interesting three-by-three table to categorize professional continuing education offerings in terms of the impact of the program (on the individual, the organization, the profession), on one dimension, and the goals of the program (remediating deficiencies, fostering growth, facilitating change), on the other dimension. The net result is a too-complex scheme that any single professional organization like SAA would find hard to tackle. I do like the role differentiation idea, however.
A big issue is whether a professional continuing education program should attempt to have its biggest impact on individuals or organizations (or even "the profession"). In my work evaluating SAA's conservation workshops, partly summarized in my article in JELIS, I suggested strongly that organizational effectiveness should be the goal and that individual fulfillment was but a nice side benefit. Having now taught dozens of workshops, I am not so sure about the viability of seeking organizational development, perhaps at the expense of individual growth. Although the choice of content and the design of the program format may attempt to reach beyond the individual learner, the dynamic between teacher and learner is all-important in the long run.
Another piece of background literature is the work of Thomas Sork on the workshop format. Sork goes to great lengths to carve out special meaning for the workshop in terms of purpose and structure. He distinguishes a workshop from other types of continuing education offerings. He provides a very useful set of definitions, which I have excerpted in an appendix to this report. I do believe we would do well to keep definitions of format clear in our minds as we attempt to distinguish basic from advanced programs.
The final element is evaluation — a goal mostly honored in the breach. The theoretical literature on educational evaluation is deep and compelling. A taste of the quality of the thinking is summarized in Worthen and Sanders. There are two key points to remember about evaluating advanced educational offerings. First, it is important to conceive of an evaluation strategy in tandem with the design of an educational program. Second, evaluation must be built around the comparison and contrasts of participant expectations across a number of dimensions, including prior experience, familiarity with the topic, technological savvy, institutional affiliation, etc.
Definitions
Basic: The OED defines "basic" as "Of, or pertaining to, or forming a base; fundamental, essential; applied to a limited Íessential' vocabulary in any language." This is fairly unambiguous. SAA's fundamental workshop series, supported by the publication of the manuals (which, we understand, continue to be best-sellers), seems to fit nicely into the concept of basic continuing education. We may want grapple with how much emphasis SAA should put on basic programming. Nevertheless, we could agree that SAA basic continuing education consists of programs that provide essential information on the fundamental principles and practices of the archival profession. Basic continuing education seeks to compensate for gaps or random weaknesses in pre-professional education obtained in a university setting. Basic continuing education is light on theory and does not attempt to substitute for or compete with formal educational programs covered under the MAS guidelines. This is not to say that SAA cannot or should not work hand in glove to offer continuing education programs in an academic setting.
Advanced: The OED is less helpful on the idea of "advanced," defining the concept as "Of study: on a higher level than the elementary." In other words, advanced is not basic. The OED also defines advanced in terms of position: "Moved forward, standing or being to the front." This may give us a clue about how to consider the relevance of "advanced" to SAA's future continuing education program.
Given what research in education has told us about role differentiation and about the particular value of obtaining organizational change by focusing on individual achievement, I suggest that we begin talking about continuing education programs that are personally "challenging" rather than "advanced." We can consider "challenging" to be a dynamic concept rather than an end-goal (such as "at the front"). We can also see the idea of challenging as constituting a continuum, say, from less to more. As a group, we may be able to come up with a better term than "challenge," but I suggest we abandon "basic" for "fundamental" and "advanced" for a term that suggests stretching one's horizons. We might even consider pulling together entire programs under the banner "Challenging Horizons" or something equally corny.
That being said, I return to the continuing professional education literature and offer a way of defining "challenging" that may help us establish program development criteria. Four separate elements play different roles in the continuing education process: learners, teachers, content, and format. We might view professional education offerings as a set of continuums. I derived the set by re-reading the rather extensive educational evaluation literature and pulling out some of the more interesting individual (as opposed to institutional) factors. My set is a start, designed to demonstrate that a definition of challenging continuing education needs to consider multiple facets.
Less Challenging to More Challenging
Learner
Teacher
Content
Format
Recommendations
If the task force is in general agreement with the thrust of the above definition, then here are some specific recommendations. SAA might need to target its offerings to members new to a given topic and assemble a group that is homogeneous in terms of its familiarity with the topic. SAA will probably need to recruit experienced teachers or train them in teaching methodologies and equip them with techniques for generalizing from the particular. SAA should identify cutting edge content and strive for deep coverage of the subject matter, even if this means risking criticism for favoring the trendy over the tried-and-true. SAA needs to develop specific educational formats that encourage active participation, are relatively small in size, and engage participants in the use of appropriate technologies.
References
Conway, Paul. "Effective Continuing Education for Training the Archivist." Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 34 (Winter 1993): 38-47.
Houle, Cyril O. Continuing Learning in the Professions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1984.
Scanlan, Craig L. "Practicing with Purpose: Goals of Continuing Professional Education." In Ronald Cervero and Craig L. Scanlan, eds. Problems and Prospects in Continuing Professional Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1985.
Sork, Thomas J. "The Workshop as a Unique Instructional Format." In Designing and Implementing Effective Workshops, edited by Thomas J. Sork, pp. 3-10. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1984.
Worthen, Blaine R. and James R. Sanders. Educational Evaluation: Alternative Approaches and Practical Guidelines. New York: Longman, 1987.
Respectfully submitted,
Paul Conway
Yale University Library
October 12, 1999
Appendix: Continuing Education Formats (from Sork)
"The term workshop refers to a relatively short-term, intensive, problem-focused learning experience that actively involves participants in the identification and analysis of problems and in the development and evaluation of solutions."
"The seminar is a session or series of sessions in which a group of experienced people meet with on or more knowledgeable resource persons to discuss a given content area."
"An institute is a short-term, often residential program that fosters intensive learning on a well-defined topic. New material is presented to add to the knowledge which the participants already have on the subject."
"The clinic is a short-term program that emphasized diagnosis and treatment of problems that participants bring to the session. Experts available at the clinic, rather than participants themselves, have primary responsibility for diagnosing problems and prescribing treatment."
"The short course is an abbreviated, more focused version of the class typically found in colleges and universities. Designed to update or deepen the knowledge of those in a particular field, the expert dominates the sessions because it focuses on communication and on acquisition of information within a short time."
Advantages of the Workshop Format
Limitations of the Workshop Format
Criteria for Selecting the Workshop Format
—Richard J. Cox, September 22, 1999
I briefly examined (with the assistance of one of my graduate students, Judy Silva) what a group of national professional associations are doing in the area of continuing education. The associations included the American Library Association, Special Libraries Association, Medical Libraries Association, Assoc. of Records Managers and Administrators, National Assoc. of Government Archives and Records Administrators, American Society for Information Science, Assoc. of Canadian Archivists, Society of Archivists (U.K.), and Australian Society of Archivists. This examination was based only on information provided at web sites. Please let me know if there is other information needing to be obtained or potentially useful in our deliberations.
ANNUAL MEETINGS AND CE. All of the organizations primarily focused on offering CE at their annual meetings. This corresponds to what SAA does, although it appears that SAA's offering of courses around the country is unprecedented in scale.
EDUCATION OFFICERS. Some associations have full-time Education Officers while others do not. Groups that have such a person, such as MLA, have more elaborate CE programs. It is obvious, however, that there is no need to fear comparison with other associations since every type of staffing (from full-time to volunteer to no-staff) is in place.
COSTS. There was not considerable data on costs, although they seemed to be in the same range as normally charged by SAA. Brief partial and day-long workshops ranged from $45 for members to $255 for non-members and from $530 to 1250 for special and distance education courses.
DISTANCE LEARNING. A couple of associations offer either distance learning, online, or home study courses. ARMA offers, for example, a home-study course on "Advanced Records and Information Management." This can be completed in nine months and costs $300. It seems that SAA's current experimentation with the ERM online course puts it out in front in such efforts.
PHILOSOPHICAL STATEMENTS. Most of the associations have some sort of philosophical statement about what it is doing in the area of CE. Below is an example of ASIS's statement:
"The purpose of ASIS Continuing Education is to help practicing information professionals develop and maintain the rapidly changing set of critical skills demanded by today's (and tomorrow's) information operations and by the changing needs of information users. As a result of ASIS' multi-disciplinary nature, we offer a unique array of short courses. Our courses are designed to help information professionals (regardless of their work setting) stay on top of the latest techniques and technologies for information management.
Most of ASIS' courses are held in conjunction with ASIS conferences. We also schedule some courses for regional presentation. Of course, we don't offer all of our courses all the time and we are always developing new courses as the issues and problems faced by information professionals change and as the tools and technologies change to meet the new challenges. Be sure to check our schedule of Upcoming Courses."
Other professional associations have fuller statements (such as the ACA with its CE guidelines and Education strategy). SAA, with its PACE guidelines, is certainly in the forefront with the comprehensive of its CE philosophy. A matter of continuing worry, and certainly one not being addressed by the other associations, is how CE relates to graduate education.
INTERESTING CE FEATURES. I noted a number of CE activities SAA might consider or we might consider putting in our report to Council. They are as follows:
1) Special targeted institutes. SLA offers a "State-of-the-Art Institute." This is "designed to provide a unique forum for the exchange of ideas on timely and thought provoking issues affecting the information industry and the business community. The target audience for the State-of-the-Art Institute includes senior-level information specialists and business professionals involved in their organization's information structure." This suggests the idea of SAA trying to offer higher cost, intensive institutes focused on reaching non-archivists such as policymakers and others.
2) Online, continuing surveys. SLA offers a Web based brief survey on professional development needs, allowing for ready communication of needs (http://www.sla.org/professional/websrvy.html). SAA could do the same and have steady feedback about what it is doing or needs to do.
3) Clearinghouse functions. MLA offers a searchable clearinghouse of all courses approved by MLA for its CE contact hours. Is a clearinghouse the most critical role SAA could take on? I will look into what clearinghouses exist and what they cover.
4) Charging for course approvals. MLA, in supporting its approving function, provides an elaborate mechanism by which programs offering CE are evaluated and approved, at a modest cost for review and listing. Perhaps this is a logical role for SAA, although given the propensity of SAA members and other archivists to complain about any additional service charges this might not be a good idea. This might also be a more appropriate role for the Academy of Certified Archivists.
—Tim Ericson, September 8, 1999
1. Continuing is a valuable member service in which SAA should continue to be involved.
2. In the traditional SAA context, "continuing education" has been defined almost exclusively in terms of workshops and seminars.
3. The SAA continuing education program has traditionally been viewed as a potential revenue source as well as a member service.
4. In actuality, the SAA continuing education program has NEVER been a revenue source and has never even broken even.
5. SAA's most notable successes in continuing education have come as the result of grant funding. (e.g. Basic Concervation, Administration of Photographic Collections, MARC AMC, Library Descriptive Standards, Case Studies Series)
6. The SAA continuing education program has focused its attention on meeting the needs of SAA members rather than meeting the needs of "the profession" in a broader sense.
7. The SAA continuing education program has traditionally tried to address both "basic" and "advanced" needs that archivists have.
8. Financial imperatives confronting the SAA continuing education program have resulted in more attention being paid to short-term goals (ie. the delivery of workshops) rather than long-term goals (ie. planning, data data gathering, long-term evaluation).
9. Traditionally the SAA Annual Meeting has been a primary venue for continuing education workshops and seminars.
10. In past years the SAA has offered continuing education activities either in conjunction with regional associations, as "stand alone" workshops (ie. the business archives workshop) or at specific locations in response to requests by employers or institutions.
11. The SAA has only recently begun to offer new continuing education options such as electronic distance education courses.