WISE receives $936,000 Grant from IMLS!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                          Contact: Bruce Kingma

                                                                                          Phone: (315) 443-4525

                                                                                          brkingma@syr.edu

WISE receives IMLS funding

WISE+: Increasing Diversity of the LIS Curriculum

The Web-based Information Science Education (WISE) consortium has received a $936,000, 3-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to fund WISE+ Leveraging the Power of the Network to Increase the Diversity of LIS Curriculum.

Funding for WISE+ supports three initiatives: 

• Partnerships between WISE member schools and professional library associations to increase course offerings to LIS graduate students and existing librarians who seek continuing education in diverse or specialized areas of study.  Association partners include: the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), American Theological Library Association (ATLA), Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS), Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA), Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC), Medical Library Association (MLA), Middle Eastern Library Association (MELA), Music Library Association (MLA), PALINET, ProLiteracy Worldwide, Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), Society of American Archivists (SAA), and Urban Libraries Council (ULC). 
• Support and training for education in quality online pedagogy. WISE will provide training to faculty and doctoral students who teach these specialized courses.  As part of this effort, WISE will establish a “WISE Scholar” program to provide certification for pedagogical training in online teaching. 
• The creation of a digital repository of learning objects from the collection of WISE supported courses.   These initiatives will be lead by teams from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh; and the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University.

WISE was developed to provide faculty training for online pedagogy, establishing standards and metrics for online library and information science (LIS) education; and provide a collaborative marketplace for online LIS courses.  Since its inaugural year as an online course-sharing model for masters programs in library and information science (LIS) WISE has welcomed 13 LIS programs from participating colleges and universities around the world, and, as of the summer of 2006 will have offered 117 online courses to 168 students.  WISE pedagogical training has included 116 faculty members and potential faculty members participating in WISE online sessions and face-to-face sessions at the ALISE and ALA conferences. 

For additional information on WISE visit the website: www.wiseeducation.org