Learning Objectives

An academic internship is a reciprocal relationship: the student benefits by learning new skills through hands-on experience, while the institution hopefully benefits from the work of the intern.

One way that the University of Oklahoma tries to ensure that interns benefit academically from their experience is by requiring them to compose a list of learning objectives. I was required to submit these before my internship began.

Since I have some experience working as a graduate assistant at the Schusterman Library at OU/Tulsa, I wanted to be sure that my intern experience at the NS/Broken Arrow library would be new and round out my growing skill set. After speaking briefly with Dr. Louderback about various possibilities for my time there, I came up with these fairly broad objectives:


Learning Objective #1: I would like to assist with collection development/management
and weeding.

Learning Objective #2: I would like to acquire experience performing research via a survey instrument.

Learning Objective #3: I would like to acquire hands-on experience serving patrons at the
Reference and Circulation desk.

Learning Objective #4: I would like to acquire experience preparing for and participating in Library
instruction.

Learning Objective #5: I would like to develop the organizational skills required to catalog and classify special collections.


The objectives were left rather broad so that we could adapt them for a variety or tasks and projects as we saw fit.

On the first day of my internship, we worked off of these learning objectives to come up with an outline for the semester. For example, for learning objective #4, we looked at the upcoming scheduled library instructional sessions to see what sessions my schedule allowed me to sit in on. We also looked at the possibility of working with a library instructor on recording an informational session.

As I continue to blog about my internship, I will return to these objectives as guideposts.