Aim High: Fostering Online Faculty Collaboration and Student Success with Digital Support Tools

While collaborative efforts between Faculty and academic support personnel are common in the residential environment, there is evidence to suggest they can be adapted to be impactful in the online environment as well. Purposeful relationships between academic support staff (Librarians and tutoring staff, in this case), offer a slew of additional benefits outside of increased student success rates. These include: quicker feedback regarding the response to resources within the online class environment, faster communication regarding the possible development of resources to support the unmet needs of online learners, increased awareness and subsequent promotion of academic resources by Faculty teaching online, and an increased sense of institutional community among all involved in the collaboration. Ultimately, “the end result of a successful collaboration is an improved online learning experience for students” (Olesova and Melville, 2017).

This session will focus on the quantitative and qualitative results of initiatives occuring at our institution; however, there is a body of research that supports the tenant that effective integration of academic support resources into the online classroom positively impacts student success. In considering approaches that may reduce the stigma surrounding the utilization of academic support resources, one effective strategy is to “make the tutor support system a core part of the student experience, not an ‘optional extra’” (Sellgren, 2019). Faculty introducing academic resources within the context of the (online or residential) classroom ensure all students are exposed to what s/he believes are the resources best fit for the content of the course and, in doing so, convey the belief that utilization of resources is normal, expected, and typically a habit of successful students. Integrating supports through such partnerships has proven impactful. “The University of Chicago Poverty Lab found that an integrated system of support services — coaching, mentoring, tutoring, professional development and financial assistance — can have a dramatic impact on enrollment and persistence … a 35 percent increase in full-time enrollment and a 47 percent increase in full-time persistence to the next school term” (Ponder, 2019).

Our online course design process involves a partnership between our course designers and library and learning services team with the goal of enhancing the student and faculty experience by improving, focusing, and promoting student learning skills through the use of resources. The academic support staff engage in this process by locating or creating supplemental supporting materials fit for the course (articles or videos, for example). These are typically hosted on a course guide - an internal website maintained by programmatic Librarians and Learning Services Coordinators. Hosting these in this location achieves the goal of providing students with adequate, relevant resources while minimizing the number of links to resources within a course.

After participating in the course design process in this way for several years, additional opportunities for Librarians and Learning Services Coordinators to enhance their collaborative function emerged. For example, to bridge the divide between student resources awareness, access, and usability, they have utilized recent advances in the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) function. This greatly increases the ease of access for students from within the online course. Since this has been successful, we have similarly integrated an internal repository of frequently asked questions when appropriate. Implementation of LTI has increased usage of course-related guides by 82% over the past year - an increase in views of of 3.5 times. This session will provide real-time views of active course guides and frequently asked questions as they exist in the course environment, then delve into the process used to establish partnerships with online Faculty as well as Instructional Designers.

In addition to materials that effectively supplement the course at the student’s point of need, the Library team has become an integrated part of the textbook selection process (this takes place immediately before a course design begins). Programmatic librarians partner with the Chair and Subject Matter Expert to build a list of possible resources from our library, including library ebooks, scholarly  articles, case studies, video/media resources, datasets, or other course related materials. The Chair of the program has the final sign-off on selected course materials. Our Chair and SMEs have gained valuable insight into library accessible materials that they would otherwise not been aware of for utilization in their courses. In addition to increasing ease of access to texts for students and reducing textbook costs for students, this streamlined approach has resulted in substantial savings for the institution: $200,000 in the 2016-2017 academic year and $270,000 in the 2018-2019 academic year.

One might assume that these integrations of academic support during the course design process would reduce the involvement of academic support once the course is being taught. Conversely, our Library and Learning Services team has been utilized in new and innovative new Faculty partnerships to support these courses. This session will provide practical implementation steps for attendees who wish to adapt any of the following examples of such practices.

One example that will be shared during this presentation involves the encouraging results of a recent initiative in our online Nutritional Principles in Nursing courses. In this initiative, all online Nursing Faculty teaching this course referred students who struggled on the first exam to online peer tutors. As a result, online peer tutoring for this subject increased by 300 online tutoring appointments compared to the prior term. Students who were referred by their online Faculty to online tutoring returned for subsequent appointments, and, as a result, this subset of students – who were on track to likely fail the course when they were referred – were successfully “remediated,” meaning they completed the course with a similar course average as their peers and had a pass rate comparable to students who did not struggle on the first exam (final course grade distributions also confirmed the impact of this collaboration).

Additional initiatives that will be shared in detail during this session include: online Faculty collaborating with an online peer tutor during synchronous Faculty lectures, the utilization of new technology tools to enable enhanced communication between online Faculty and online peer tutors, and a collaboration with online Faculty to promote online peer tutoring for students enrolled in a virtual Computer Focused Principles course. In order to enable attendees to replicate these programs, this portion of the presentation will cover how these partnership came to be so successful, details regarding the critical communication within this partnership, live demonstrations of each step that was taken by students, and student comments on their experience.  

Virtual research consultations with internal Librarians. are also gaining momentum as part of academic library services as a result of course integration efforts.  These offer distance learners the opportunity to engage with an internal Librarian and provide essential follow up information literacy instruction, student support to promote academic success, and relieve library anxiety (Kuglitsch, Tingle, & Watkins, 2017). Further, students find value in face to face consultations because they provide an opportunity to talk through complex problems and questions while providing effective benefits such as relationship building and reassurance (Kuglitsch, Tingle, & Watkins, 2017). Our college implemented research appointments in 2017 to expand upon the existing Library Chat services. We have partnered with faculty in a number of high-stakes courses that include research assignments and achieved strong results in relation to course completion, student success, and student satisfaction regarding their experience.

By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:

• articulate a mutually-beneficial approach to collaborating with online Faculty at their home institutions

• identify examples of potentially productive partnerships between academic support and online Faculty

• plan the reasonable replication of successfully transferring existing residential services to the online environment

References

Kuglitsch, R. Z., Tingle, N., & Watkins, A. (2017). Facilitating Research Consultations Using Cloud Services: Experiences, Preferences, and Best Practices. Information Technology & Libraries, 36(1), 29–35. https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v36i1.8923

Milman, N.B., Posey, L., Pintz, C., Wright, K., & Zhou, P. (2015). Online Master’s Students’ Perceptions of Institutional Supports and Resources: Initial Survey Results. Online Learning, 19(4), 45-67. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1079593.pdf.

Olesova, L.A. & Melville, A.D. (2017). Embedded Library Services: From Cooperation to Collaboration to Enhance Student Learning in Asynchronous Online Course. Journal of Library & Information Services in Distance Learning, 11:3-4, 287-299.  https://doi.org/10.1080/1533290X.2017.1404546

Ponder, P. (2019, May 29). We know what works to help students succeed. Are we willing to do it? Retreived from https://www.chicagobusiness.com/opinion/we-know-what-works-help-students-succeed-are-we-willing-do-it.

Sellgren, K. (2019, May 29). 'Swallow your pride and ask for help', first-time students told. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/education-48267420.