An Analysis of the Growth, Education and Academic Research Trends of iSchools

Abstract

The iSchool movement has been rapidly spread out since the foundation of iSchool Caucus (iCaucus) in 2005, which currently 52 schools have joined across 16 countries. This research aims to investigate the advances in this movement and its impact on education and research in the field of library and information science (LIS) in order to explore future trends in LIS education and research. To do so, this study classifies 21 ALA-accredited iSchools into three groups suggested by King (2006) and comparatively analyzes each group in terms of its temporal advances and curriculum characteristics. Moreover, as the new movement of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has been rapidly progressing with the initiative of North American schools since 2012, this study also intends to diagnose the possibility of its spillover effect in LIS education by examining application cases.