Responding to the online pivot, our university library constructed an interactive toolkit intended for librarian support. The result is an adaptable pedagogical and technological online instruction repository for librarians and faculty. Couched in our unique perspective as teaching and technology librarians, we challenge participants to embrace creativity and untapped resources.
In response to an identified need for both subject liaison and faculty support for pedagogical guidance in transitioning courses online, our teaching and learning division within the university library constructed an interactive toolkit. Initially created out of a desire and need for an accessible repository of pedagogical and technological guidance and training for our librarians, the toolkit gained traction as the library’s referred-to source for scaffolded instruction for faculty seeking to create meaningful and valuable online interactions and learning materials for their students.
In the shifting landscape of higher education, university libraries increasingly employ and utilize the skills of instructional designers, media specialists, and educational technologists who work alongside library staff and faculty in order to create rich and meaningful multimedia and multimodal projects. This environment has generated thoughtful and purposeful instructional interactions that are grounded in solid information and media literacy constructs as well as pedagogical theories. With the rapid and unprecedented pivot to online learning as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education has had to leverage resources, skill sets, and expertise from within. While the university library has long been poised as a conduit for the dispensation of information literacy, recent movements in digital humanities and makerspace initiatives place it at the nexus of the academic community for research and information production transcending the traditional forms. With instruction and media professionals already in place, the library emerges as a potentially untapped resource in the increasing demand for curricular transition support.
From our unique perspective as information and technology professionals immersed within a library organization, this Discovery Session will explore the ways in which we honed in on an expressed need for support and harnessed our collective backgrounds in media and instructional design in order to support our librarians and, in turn, the faculty body at large. Aligning with the Engaged and Effective Teaching & Learning track, our session uncovers ways in which untapped expertise within an organization might scaffold and support faculty professional development in their mission to improve their teaching and learning skill set through a streamlined compilation of resources for self-guided, modular learning.
Attendees will be encouraged to reflect on their own opportunities for collaboration within their organization alongside key session takeaways including: ‘lessons learned’ through our experiential design and development process; a modifiable needs assessment; our own reflections on impact and long-term implementations; and suggestions for adaptability of content for settings both within and outside of academia. In addition, attendees will be challenged to frame instruction for adult learners in a way that both informs and guides while confronting long-held beliefs that online instruction is simply a diluted, inferior version of tradition, face-to-face engagement.
We will structure the session as follows: a concise overview of how the toolkit was conceptualized from the results of a needs analysis; the iterative work involved in determining, prioritizing, and creating the content; our process of on-going reflection based on feedback and the surfacing of new needs; considerations regarding long-term maintenance; assessment of the impactfulness of this effort; suggestions and recommendations for those wishing to adapt and develop a similar resource using either paid or open source tools. Materials provided will include a copy of the needs assessment leveraged for this pilot project, a link to the toolkit, as well as a resource list for attendees’ own exploration for development.
Designed with the belief that interactivity is key to meaningful engagement, this asynchronous session will include ways in which attendees may interface with the material created through guided walk-throughs of identified content. Attendees will be asked to reflect on their own perceptions, experiences, and unique situations through the comments. We anticipate that the fullest engagement will take place through dynamic discussions amongst attendees. Questions and feedback will be part of this uniquely virtual experience, and we hope that further opportunities for collaboration or sharing of best practices emerge. Ultimately, our goal is to share this content so that it can be adapted by the conference audience into a variety of contexts. By making it open for adaptation, attendees can gather and modify anything they find useful in order to create engaging and meaningful online instructional experiences.
Holistically, this session offers an exciting glimpse at a project that is organic in nature as we continue to develop and hone the content. As the toolkit is ever-evolving in response to identified needs, we look forward to sharing insights into where the project has been, where it stands to-date, as well as our vision for the future impact and the ways in which we might collectively learn from one another’s experiences during this unprecedented time in higher education history.