The Instructor’s Roles in Distance Education for Library and Information Science

With the rapid developments of information technologies, distance education programs in library and information science are increasing across the world. Instructors play very important roles in providing high quality instruction for students. Given this climate, this article briefly compares the traditional education with distance education and discusses the instructor’s roles from multiple perspectives. The related literature is reviewed, which results in the recommendation that instructors should prepare for and perform multiple roles while teaching. Only when much more importance is attached to multiple roles in distance education by instructors themselves, administrators, and accreditors can the quality of distance education, assessment and evaluation be effectively improved in the future. Instructors who are accustomed to delivering lectures in face-to-face classrooms and will teach online should have a good mastery of the multiple teaching roles transformation, be very clear about what roles and responsibilities they should have in distance education, and have the corresponding changing role-related skills and competencies in order to provide the high quality teaching for distance learners