Switching from books to MOOCs

Guest lecturer Mr. Randolf Mariano

The Green Spine Book Fair, a 3-day event which include interesting discourses and other related-activities, hosted a lecture in partnership with the American Corner Manila, entitled, From Books to MOOCs: Massive Thinking in Today's Online Library Programming held on August 13, 2014 at the 6/F of The Learning Commons.​ This served as an ideal complementary topic for this year’s book fair theme, Creating Synergy: Finding a Parallel Place for Print, E-Books and Human Books in Academic Libraries.

The lecture was designed to introduce Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs), an open access online course that is able to accommodate unlimited number of participants. Through the discussions, participants were expected to be able to understand how libraries can use MOOCs in their various programming activities and engage a wider reach of audience using the web.

Mr. Randolf D. Mariano, the Reference Librarian of the Thomas Jefferson Information Center (TJIC), shared TJIC’s best practices on using MOOCs.​ He started by sharing his personal experience that jump-started his knowledge and expertise as a MOOCs moderator.

Library and information science students from the National Teachers College, Philippine Normal University and Polytechnic University of the Philippines later on had a chance on enlisting to the new MOOCs being offered by the TJIC discussing on the topic applying to U.S universities.