Building an online Skills Hub for the University of Northampton

A poster outlining the initial processes and planning that was involved in building the University of Northampton's Skills Hub during 2012-2013, prior to its launch in September 2013

Survival: how to do your existing job and more ... with fewer people

We are all facing demands to do more with less. Following a restructure in December 2012, academic librarians at the University of Northampton were down four team members, the role of the team remained the same, but student numbers and distance learners were growing. This is the story of how we created the Skills Hub, a repository of skills based OERs, without money and with fewer staff. In September 2013, Library and Learning Services (LLS) launched the Skills Hub (http://skillshub.northampton.ac.uk), a repository of open educational resources (OERs) for use by schools, students, researchers and the community. Since its launch the content has had more than 14,000 views per month and has had visitors from 88 countries. Around 70 of the OERs have been created in-house by LLS staff and many take the form of bite-sized videos. To date, the total funding that the Skills Hub has received has been £422. In addition, there are no dedicated staff working on the Skills Hub. Development work has been undertaken by integrating the production of open educational resources into existing staff workloads. Since January 2013, the Academic Librarians and the Academic Practice Tutors have been actively and enthusiastically engaged in both the technical and content aspects of OER creation. Training has been by means of peer-to-peer support and by setting aside time for rapid development days. Openness is one of the strategic priorities at Northampton and the Skills Hub is built around this principle. All of its content is created or sourced under a Creative Commons licence and users are encouraged to take and use elements as they choose. It is delivered via a flexible, engaging and exciting interface that uses visual cues and graphical and media consistency to help orientate the user. Content is applicable not only to students at Northampton but also to schools and the public as part of our commitment to community engagement. There are no passwords, content is regularly reviewed and updated and feedback from users is an integral part of each resource. This paper will present the development of the Skills Hub with an honest account of the process we went through, the challenges we faced and the content created. We will share how we reviewed the content and focussed the development through the use of learning analytics and student evaluators. We will also discuss how we got buy-in from across the university, both from within and without of the department, particularly looking at the project development and at critical political and strategic points in the project timeline. Finally, we will discuss how we carefully positioned the project within the arena of learning and teaching and alongside the University’s open access agenda, as a means of protecting the project and enabling its survival. The Skills Hub offers hope to colleagues who might fear that the development of open educational resources is beyond them as well as materials that they can customize and integrate into their own teaching and learning activities

Developing research and visual analysis skills in design students: a multi-agency approach

Rationale Since 2009, a team of staff from the School of the Arts and the library have collaborated to develop a series of learning and teaching activities aimed at improving students’ research skills. The focus has been on research methods that merge design theory and studio practice, providing students with real world research skills that are authentic within the context of design (Dimmock, Hoon and MacLellan, 2013). Specifically, the team has worked to develop students’ research ability through the visual analysis of primary artefacts. For the conference, the team will deliver an interactive workshop modelling visual analysis, which mirrors an assessment undertaken by second year Graphics and Illustration students. In this assessment, students select an artefact from the University of Northampton special collections and analyse it in terms of the aesthetic, cultural and technical data encoded in the artefact (Hoon, 2013). This exercise is then used as a springboard for the students to conduct further research through direct engagement with specialist museums, agencies, archives and libraries. Workshop participants will be given the opportunity to discuss how this pedagogy could be used in their own subject. The team is now also working on an OER for the Skills Hub (LLS, 2013) that will model this research methodology. Content and Delivery Methods The workshop will cater for up to 20 participants working in groups. The facilitators will explain the process of visual analysis and each group will be provided with an artefact to examine according to its aesthetic, technical and cultural qualities. Groups will then be asked to consider how they would use the observations from their visual examination as a springboard for further research

Research into practice: evaluation of Skills Hub content and implications for library staff development in the creation of video OERs

The University of Northampton Skills Hub is an online open-access repository of academic skills resources whose primary content is a body of short video open educational resources (OERs) created in-house by staff. To ensure OER quality and to identify staff development needs, the Skills Hub: Review, Redesign, Rebuild project was conducted. The project assessed the quality of fifty of the Skills Hub’s video OERs by inviting fifteen reviewers from different user groups to critically assess the resources. The results were analysed thematically and then considered in relation to the extant literature on the creation of multimedia educational resources and online OERs. Four main practical categories required attention in the creation of future video OERs: technical, presentation, structural and content. These four categories fed into four superordinate categories regarding cognition and reception of OERs: comprehension, concentration, information retention and professionalism. Practitioner recommendations are made for video OER producers, and the findings are situated in relation the principles of multimedia learning theory

What is visual literacy?

What is visual literacy? This opening presentation will begin by examining what is meant by visual literacy and why it is of growing importance. Within our educational institutions and society, how are we preparing young people and students for the visually saturated world we inhabit and what role should librarians play? Visual critique has traditionally been seen as within the domain of Art and Design, but should elements of this skill set be shared outside the Arts? Conversely, are there elements of visual literacy currently not factored into Arts programmes? The issues range from our ability to consciously critique visual data that is presented for consumption, including mass and social media images, through to how we consciously produce and encode our own diagrams, images and films. In 2010, Georgina was funded by ARLIS to attend the 2010 International Visual Literacy Association Conference (IVLA), an organisation made up of professionals from a diverse range of subject disciplines, each with their own slant on visual literacy. Georgina will discuss the differing attitudes and approaches taken to visual literacy by the conference delegates and what the experience taught her about the role of librarians. Finally, a number of current visual literacy interventions with Business and Design students at the University of Northampton will be outlined

Skills Hub for Schools: building students’ information and academic skills through open educational resources

This workshop will involve discussion of students’ skills needs, particularly in the social media environment, as they think about going into work and as they approach the transition to University. We will also discuss the variety of Open Educational Resources that are available for you to use with your students. The session will finish with a look at the University of Northampton’s Skills Hub and a discussion of University’s Skills Hub for Schools project

The importance of questions: information skills in a visual, material and digital world

Georgina Dimmock is Head of Academic Liaison at the University of Northampton library, where she leads a team of five academic librarians across six subject schools. Previously, Georgina worked for seven years as the library’s Academic Support Manager to the School of the Arts. It was during this time she worked with History of Design academics to develop information skills programmes that merged studio practice and theory, particularly looking at visual research skills. Since 2007 she has also taught visual information literacy to first year students within the Northampton Business School. Recently, Georgina was awarded University funding to develop Skills Hub for Schools, a repository of open educational resources aimed at sixth form students transitioning into their first year at University (http://skillshub.northampton.ac.uk). Georgina is a Fellow of the Higher Education Teaching Academy

Skills Hub: Review, Redesign, Rebuild

A short presentation outlining the methodology and findings of the Skills Hub: Review, Redesign, Rebuild Project

Changing roles and functions of academic librarians

EMALINK workshop looking at the changing and future roles of academic librarians

Skills Hub: user attitudes and new directions

The Skills Hub is a repository of open educational resources (OERs) for students, schools, researchers and the community, which aims to develop users’ study skills. In December 2013, University funding was awarded for the Skills Hub: Review, Redesign and Rebuild project to evaluate the Skills Hub content and enable further development. This presentation details the methodology of the project and highlights key findings from the research. Recommendations for future development of the Skills Hub are made and areas in need of further research are identified