Navigating the Online Tutorial Frontier: From Design to Deployment & Beyond

As we all have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, online teaching is a vital part of creating an open future of learning environments in higher education. Asynchronous online information literacy tutorials can engage and support online and face-to-face library users, and the planning and design process can take many forms. Librarians do not have to be instructional designers, have funding, or be accessibility experts to create engaging, online research tutorials. In this session, a panel of academic and online learning librarians from across the country will discuss creating tutorials with a variety of tools, budgets, and timelines. H5P, LibWizard, Articulate, and homegrown systems will be among the tools discussed. Speakers will present on the planning and implementation process of the tutorials, as well as accessibility considerations. Specific accessibility frameworks will be discussed, such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and WCAG 2.0, as well as free tools and checklists librarians can use to test accessibility. Panelists will share a variety of assessment strategies, including using student workers for usability testing, linking to form assessments, web analytics, and user surveys. In an increasingly digital world, it is essential for academic librarians to be able to create effective and engaging asynchronous learning materials to connect patrons with information literacy concepts. Participants will leave this session ready to jump into their online learning future and make quality content without overthinking it

Skills of Subject Librarians for Digital Literacy Instruction in Academic Libraries

The evolution of internet and the widespread adoption of technology in academic libraries brings about new roles and responsibilities for subject librarians. Digital literacy instruction remains the indispensable service in academic libraries in the 21st century. This emphasises the necessity for subject librarians to possess relevant digital literacy skills. This article reports on the quantitative findings emanating from the explanatory sequential mixed methods study (2022) that investigated digital literacy instruction in academic libraries in the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) region in South Africa. The quantitative findings were used to achieve the study’s objective that sought to find out if subject librarians possess digital literacy skills necessary for digital literacy instruction in academic libraries in KwaZulu-Natal region, South Africa. The study adopted a census method and collected data from a total of 58 subject librarians from traditional universities and universities of technology in KZN region through an online survey. The findings revealed that subject librarians in academic librarians (KwaZulu-Natal region, South Africa) are competent in various digital literacy namely e-mailing skills, Word processing, PowerPoint, information retrieval and blended learning. Further, the study revealed a significant lack of digital literacy skills related to library management system, knowledge of statistical software packages, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Access, Website design and copyright licensing

Digital literacy in practice: Developing an interactive and accessible open educational resource based on the SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy

As part of a review of the undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum at Leeds Metropolitan University, digital literacy was formally adopted as a graduate attribute in 2011. Libraries and Learning Innovation (LLI) have since been working on ways to improve the digital literacy of staff and students through a variety of means including promotion of Open Educational Resources (OER). This paper deals with one of those projects: the use of Xerte Online Toolkits (XOT) to create interactive resources which are supported by mobile devices. This ongoing project is truly collaborative, with members of academic staff and library staff (academic librarians, learning technologists and the repository developer) working together to create useful tools to support learning. The XOT project resulted from an audit by the university’s Open Educational Resources Group (led by LLI) which identified a need for mobile-friendly tutorials. From this, an interactive tutorial focussing on the SCONUL 7 Pillars of Information Literacy was developed. With the addition of new software to create interactive subject guides, the project aims to create more interactive resources to support students’ digital literacy

Design Matters: How a Course Review Informed Online Teaching Best Practices

This paper discusses how an Applying the Quality Matters (QM) Rubric for Higher Education workshop had an impact on the online teaching practice of three academic librarians. The QM Rubric was used to review and update a credit-bearing information literacy course taught by the authors’ department. The authors reflect on how this training influenced their relationship to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic (and beyond), using examples from their own experiences to demonstrate how instruction librarians contributed to online education during this period and how they used sustainable teaching practices to lessen the workloads of their teaching colleagues. Future steps include improved documentation, assessment, management and maintenance of digital learning objects used in online teaching

Create or Curate: An Environmental Scan of Digital Learning Object Development

A 2012 survey focused on the sharing of information literacy teaching materials (PDF) found that current practice amongst many librarians creating digital resources is to find existing learning materials before developing their own. In 2017 we conducted a survey to examine whether this continued to be true for librarians creating or reusing Digital Learning Objects (DLOs) and what best practices regarding design and development of DLOs were being used. We adopted the New Media Consortium (NMC) definition for DLOs which describes them as “any grouping of materials that is structured in a meaningful way and is tied to an educational objective.” Examples include: a video on YouTube, an interactive online module, or a stand-alone activity or website that includes a mix of videos, and interactive components

Academic libraries in COVID-19: a renewed mission for digital literacy.

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has placed online learning, blended or hybrid provision as the ‘new normal’ in Higher Education. For most universities and their academic libraries, especially those with a less strong online presence, the pandemic has caused numerous challenges. However, it has also been a catalyst for change and resifting of priorities. For academic librarians involved in the delivery of information skills/literacy training, a renewed mission is emerging, addressing access and connectivity to resources, designing for online education and fostering the development of digital literacy of students. Design/methodology/approach: This is a conceptual paper based on the author’s personal experiences and subjective opinion as a Library and Information Science educator with considerable expertise in online distance learning in the U.K. Reflecting critically on the impact of the pandemic from an educational point of view and on key changes experienced, the paper centres on the argument that academic librarians could emerge as strategic partners in Higher Education, towards the direction of enhancing students’ digital competences development. Findings: The complete and involuntary shift to online learning due to COVID-19 restrictions, has opened the door to multiple challenges in Higher Education, which are complex and ongoing: the implementation of remote tools and practices en masse in online teaching and learning in a way that ensures accessibility and equity for all, issues connecting to online pedagogy, and how to prepare students with the information and digital literacy competences required for the new online learning ‘normal’. As academic libraries move forward, they have a renewed mission to help learners in the online space to become both information rich and digitally competent. There is an opportunity to act as the connecting link that will help to move a step forward a strategic vision that places design for equity at the center of education. Originality/value: The impact of COVID-19 within Higher Education and academic libraries more specifically, is a theme that has not been yet sufficiently discussed, researched or critically debated as the world is still currently going through the pandemic crisis. This paper aims to initiate some early thoughts and conversation as well as put forward the author’s personal critical positioning on the issues, challenges and potential opportunities emerging in the current educational climate for academic librarians and to highlight areas of importance for the design and direction of information and library science curricula

GoGo Gadget Google Suite: Using Google Suite Tools to Enhance Online Learning

The authors of these proceedings came together as collaborators after meeting during the LOEX 2020 virtual conference. With a sudden shift to virtual learning, the three librarians shared ideas and methods for online engagement in library instruction. Despite their vastly different institutions, all three created active digital learning tools using components of the Google Suite of resources, namely, Docs, Forms, and Sites

Go Research! Building an Information Literacy Tool that Bridges the Gap

With the increase in online learning, identifying new ways to develop the information literacy skills of distance learners is paramount. Developing a research question, selecting resources, searching databases, refining search results, getting full text, and citing sources in the online environment can be especially challenging for nontraditional learners who may not have the same digital know-how as traditional students or digital natives. Global Campus librarians at Central Michigan University (CMU) travel to CMU’s remote centers to provide information literacy instruction for core research courses. But how do they reach everyone, including students taking classes online? Because distance students are typically expected to explore resources and manage assignments independently, Global Campus Library Services (GCLS) librarians developed a self-paced, interactive tutorial to help them develop the basic research skills needed to be successful in their coursework. All CMU students can access the LibGuides-based Go Research! tutorial online to assess what they already know, interact with multimedia tools and resources that foster specific information literacy skills, and evaluate their own learning outcomes. To promote its use, GCLS librarians incorporate the tutorial into ongoing library instruction, and work with selected faculty to integrate the tutorial into research-intensive classes. This presentation describes the collaborative planning, design, implementation and evaluation of this information literacy tutorial, and discusses how its content and use have been modified over time to facilitate flipped classroom instruction and better meet the needs of online students and faculty

Ensuring the discoverability of digital images for social work education : an online tagging survey to test controlled vocabularies

The digital age has transformed access to all kinds of educational content not only in text-based format but also digital images and other media. As learning technologists and librarians begin to organise these new media into digital collections for educational purposes, older problems associated with cataloguing and classifying non-text media have re-emerged. At the heart of this issue is the problem of describing complex and highly subjective images in a reliable and consistent manner. This paper reports on the findings of research designed to test the suitability of two controlled vocabularies to index and thereby improve the discoverability of images stored in the Learning Exchange, a repository for social work education and research. An online survey asked respondents to "tag", a series of images and responses were mapped against the two controlled vocabularies. Findings showed that a large proportion of user generated tags could be mapped to the controlled vocabulary terms (or their equivalents). The implications of these findings for indexing and discovering content are discussed in the context of a wider review of the literature on "folksonomies" (or user tagging) versus taxonomies and controlled vocabularies

Small Actions, Grassroots Efforts, and Community Building: Inspiring Fresh Perspectives on Teaching Information Literacy in Uncertain Times

In this workshop two academic librarians will share about their grassroots approach to fostering civic and digital literacies through their work in teaching “lateral reading” and online source evaluation. We will reflect on how a small action, creating an online research guide, was a seed for growing roots - connections and relationships - and for expanding our own teaching and our educational outreach. While we’ll touch on work with lateral reading, our primary focus will be reflecting with fellow librarians on small actions as regenerative responses to burnout and as starting points for more collective engagement in civic literacy education. Learning Outcomes: Recognize and normalize experiences of frustration or overwhelm in the face of challenges with teaching digital, media, and civic literacies. Identify a challenge or goal for your instructional practice. Identify stumbling blocks to approaching that challenge or goal. Engage in community building and reflect on ways to further build community in and/or beyond your local context