UNLV Libraries: Partners in Student Learning

The University Libraries play a central educational role at UNLV. Librarians offer workshops for faculty on assignment design and research on student learning. The workshops emphasize learning outcomes, active learning, and assessment of student learning. Institutes leverage UNLV Librarians’ expertise with facilitation and information literacy learning outcomes. Learning Outcomes for Faculty Institutes: To understand how research-based learning approaches support student success. To articulate goals and learning outcomes for research assignments in order to communicate expectations to students and form the basis for assessment of student work. To investigate research-based learning activities that integrate library and information resources. To discover technology options that support scalability and sustainability of research-based learning. To share strategies and discuss resources to help faculty who mentor graduate assistants and part-time instructors to support the integrated research assignment. Institutes and Workshops Offered: Milestone Experience Workshops Faculty Institute – Second Year Seminar Teacher-Librarian Institute Faculty Institute – First Year Seminar Faculty Institute on Capstone & Course Design Hotel Faculty Institute on Core Course Design Faculty Institute on Research Based Learning in High Impact Course

Libraries & Student Success

What makes a difference in student success? The framing questions for this presentation are: What makes students stay in college and finish a degree? What prevents them from finishing? What can librarians and faculty do to increase students\u27 chances of succeeding at learning and at earning a degree? This presentation will address high impact practices identified by George Kuh and adopted by the AAC&U, and give some examples of how libraries can support those high impact practices. It will also address student engagement, as measured by tools like the National Survey of Student Engagement or NSSE, and how libraries can contribute to a sense of belonging and engagement for students. I will discuss best practices for course design and assignment design, and how librarians can have an impact there. And finally, I\u27ll talk about the data, and what we know about library programs that make an impact on student grades and retention

Engaging Student Veterans as Researchers: Libraries Initiating Campus Collaborations

Student veteran enrollment in higher education has increased significantly following the Post-9/11 GI Bill (Molina & Morse, 2015). The professional literature of academic libraries includes several examples of outreach to this growing population, most of which involve marketing to student veterans differently, customizing existing services and spaces for student veterans, and honoring student veterans for their military service. But reaching out to student veterans can be difficult. Student veterans frequently have work and family responsibilities competing for their time and attention, and, as outreach librarian and former Army sergeant Sarah LeMire notes in her 2015 ACRL contributed paper, they are often reluctant to participate in programs that make them seem more needy than other students. We expanded our library’s outreach to student veterans by hosting a symposium for student veterans to present their research projects. This approach is distinctive insofar as we address potential participants foremost as competent researchers, emphasizing their strengths rather than their needs. We also collaborated with various campus offices to integrate student veteran researchers into campus-wide research showcase events. This paper shares strategies for working with student veteran researchers and for securing buy-in among relevant campus stakeholders

Participation on the High Plains: Increasing Student Engagement in an Upper- Division, Three-Credit Information Literacy Course

The presenters teach a three-credit, upper-division information literacy course to students in various majors. In this session, experience the various philosophies and activities we use to engage our students and create a cohesive interdisciplinary course. Attendees will be able to apply what they learn to any IL credit course they teach

Best Teaching Practices Expo 2020

UNLV Instructors will share mini-workshops on topics including in-class polling, leading discussions on difficult topics, and more. Join us for refreshments, check out the new Faculty Center space and learn from colleagues.https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/btp_expo/1085/thumbnail.jp

Double, Triple, Quadruple the Recipe: Serve Library Instruction to a Crowd (and Assess It, Too!) with LibGuides and PollEverywhere

Offering library instruction to a class of over 200 may sound impossible -- or crazy -- but some library instruction recipes can be scaled up to serve a crowd. The presenters (a political science instructor and a librarian) embedded library activities on politics and the media by creating an online guide to help students find news and information on political campaigns and then evaluate that information. Students participated in class discussion and shared their findings and reflections through cellphone voting. In this session we’ll share our strategies and results, and invite the audience to participate with PollEverywhere! At many institutions class sizes are growing, which can make active learning more difficult to plan and carry out. In addition to the pressures of larger classes, some librarians have more instruction demands than they can handle. If that sounds familiar, then this session is for you. We will present a model for delivering library instruction to many students at once, which can be both efficient and effective. In our presentation we will share strategies for getting students involved and engaged in a lecture hall, our methods for assessing student learning from the library activities, and results of our assessment

Collaborating with Teaching Faculty on Transparent Assignment Design

In light of a campus-wide curricular change at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), the University Libraries created Faculty Institutes to build capacity for effective teaching and assessment practices campus-wide. The UNLV Libraries Faculty Institutes are multi-day workshops designed and delivered by librarians to help teaching faculty create courses and assignments that are research-rich and closely aligned with the newly launched General Education learning outcomes. This chapter provides the situational factors leading to the overhaul of General Education at UNLV and how librarians leveraged this opportunity to maximize their role as experts in information literacy and instructional design. This chapter also describes how librarians used instructional design principles for creating significant learning experiences1 and transparent assignment design2 to guide the development and delivery of the Faculty Institutes. Finally, we draw on our experiences to suggest that the interdisciplinarity and specialized skills of librarians make us particularly poised to be leaders of curricular transformation at our institutions

Welcome to the University Libraries Poster Session!

Over the past eight years, the UNLV Libraries have led and contributed to campus initiatives to revise the undergraduate curriculum and student learning outcomes at UNLV. Through formal and informal leadership roles, librarians helped to create the University Undergraduate Learning Outcomes (UULOs) in the areas of Intellectual Breadth and Lifelong Learning, Communication, Inquiry and Critical Thinking, Global/Multicultural Knowledge and Awareness, and Citizenship and Ethics and a revised model for general education. In Fall 2011, the Faculty Senate approved a vertical pathway of key courses, which serve to integrate and assess the UULOs from a student’s first year of college through graduation . The Libraries have partnered to implement this model through faculty development initiatives, design of assignments to teach and assess the inquiry and critical thinking UULO, and curriculum mapping in academic programs. In addition, the creation of co-curricular programs, such as a workshop program for Libraries student employees, and the updating of our teaching and learning spaces underscore our important role as partners in education at UNLV