“We Were Working Alongside with, rather than for, a Professor”: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Fostering Community and Research Skills through Project-Based Learning in Online LIS Education

The rise of online library and information science (LIS) education has made advancement in the field more accessible to individuals who cannot take on the burdens of in-person graduate-school coursework. However, the online classroom environment also comes with challenges regarding communication and community-building for instructors and students. Furthermore, the expectations placed on LIS students continue to grow, with original research, in particular, becoming an increasingly important skill for new graduates. To address these issues by fostering research success and a sense of community in a new five-week online LIS course, the course instructor and lead author of this reflective essay designed the course as a participatory research lab where the instructor fully participated in all course assignments and activities that students participated in. Over five course modules, students and instructor each chose a research topic and then created and shared four in-depth reflective discussion posts on their topics, which were then incorporated into final papers that were submitted on the last day of class. To encourage a research mindset, each participant wrote the paper with a peer-reviewed journal in mind—with the goal of creating at least an early draft of a paper that could eventually be submitted for journal publication. Though the course was offered online, the class utilized weekly Zoom meetings and asynchronous discussions to build a community of learners who encouraged each other in their learning and growth. This autoethnographic case study, authored jointly by students and instructor, is a reflection on both the factors that enabled success and how this participatory approach to instruction can be improved in the future. Our experiment in participatory online learning has broadened our understandings of what an online classroom looks like and how we can show up for each other, even when we are not interacting in person.