Library Instruction West 2016

As librarians, we often focus our teaching on helping students gather and evaluate sources. To take online learning to the next level, how can librarians teach students to engage meaningfully with sources and develop strategies for reading academic texts? In this session, a community college librarian will share her experience embedding reading activities in an online information literacy course. These flexible, adaptable learning tools can be used in a variety of instructional scenarios, including one-shot instruction. Attendees will learn ways to improve students' research skills while also increasing their reading comprehension. This session is appropriate for all librarians who are inspired to encourage and develop academic literacy skills.

This presentation will illustrate how two instructional design librarians tackled teaching the drab topic of plagiarism and elevated it to a fabulous online tutorial.  Participants will gain insight into the techniques used to move online instruction from clicking an arrow to get to the next screen and multiple choices quizzes to an enhanced active learning experience that challenges pre-existing thought and builds knew knowledge and skills. Learn how instructional design practices, storyboards, proof of concepts, and technology combine to elevate the online learning experience by giving learners the opportunity to interact with tutorial content through the use of "You Try" activities that incorporate drag and drop exercises, animated video, sequencing activities and more. The presenters will also discuss how this online tutorial is being used to enhance course curriculum by integrating it into the platforms that faculty are using, from static web pages to course management systems. 

3:00-3:30 Building a Learning Centered Classroom (Emily Swanson)

The Westminster College Library classroom was designed in 1997. On the original building plans, it was called the "computer classroom"; representative of the bibliographic, lecture-based instruction of the time. In 2014, we applied for and were rewarded a Library Services and Technology Act grant from the Utah State Library Division, Department of Heritage and Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services to re-design the classroom. Our goal was to make a learning-centered classroom. We removed PCs to accommodate student's personal laptops. We added displays and used technology that allows us to un-tether from the podium computer. We bought modular tables that encourage group work and class discussions. We were collaborative in the redesign process. We worked with IT, we surveyed students, and we partnered with an environmental psychology class to assess the design. I will discuss: the process, the learning centered design, and the changes to our instruction.  

3:30-4:00 OER and Digital Composition: An Instructor and Librarian's Perspective on Student Engagement and Faculty Support (Cayce Van Horn)

Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a unique opportunity to break cost barriers and engage e-learning students with relevant, freely available texts. As both an English instructor and an instruction librarian, I have drawn upon my combined experiences in e-learning, information literacy instruction, and English education to evaluate available OER, select the most engaging materials, and build a composition course that challenges students to question the open education movement. Learn how libraries can support innovative technologies, enhance online learning, and foster the adoption of OER by locating relevant, engaging, accessible materials and supporting faculty involvement with freely available resources.  

Instruction librarians develop a tremendous amount of instructional materials (i.e. learning objects) when they prep for teaching, and are often happy to share. If pooled, librarians' existing learning objects could dramatically, and sustainably, scale up a library instruction program by saving prep time and eliminating redundant development efforts. This presentation will illustrate a case study of how librarians at Cal State Fullerton do exactly this. Using the easy-to-learn platform Wordpress, the Instructional Design Librarian implemented a simple learning object repository to facilitate storing, sharing, and discovery of learning objects. As a result, librarians reuse and adapt their colleagues' work and have a prominent outlet to share their own materials with faculty and students. This repository increases library instruction visibility, and is expandable, through additional free and paid plug-ins, to function to as a simple Learning Management System. This presentation will outline strategies for attendees to set up their own repositories. 

10:45-11:15 Guided Adventures in Team Hiking: Collaborations between Librarians and Writing Program Faculty to Flip the One-Shot Library Workshop

Librarians at UC San Diego teamed up with a writing program coordinator on campus to re-imagine the one-shot library workshops provided to all of the college's first-year transfer students. An online tutorial on database searching made up of multimedia and active learning experiences was created for students to complete the week before the library workshop.    / After learning about the research process, database search strategies and how to access articles in full-text, students were required to use their newly learned skills to bring printed articles they had found to the library instruction session. During the workshop with the librarian, students learned how to construct a research question.

11:15-11:45 Digital Research Notebook: A Simple Tool for Reflective Learning at Scale

Although deep, sustained engagement with students is desirable, many librarians still work within the confines of the one-shot instruction session, some at universities serving tens of thousands of undergraduate students. Librarians must thus find creative ways to work at scale in order to help students craft thoughtful research questions, scaffold their research process, and think critically about the sources they find. To meet this challenge, librarians at UCLA created a digital "research notebook" which, through a combination of video tutorials and reflective writing prompts, guides student through the research process. The notebook can be assigned on its own, as a pre-assignment for a one-shot session, or as the backbone of a credit course or research consultation. This session will discuss the pedagogical framework of the notebook and offer simple ways participants can implement it at their own institutions.
 

1:15-1:145 Emerging with eBooks: College Students Create Digital Publications

The librarian designed and taught a course where college students created ebooks. The timely project incorporated both information and digital literacy skills by following the lifecycle of an ebook from conception to publication. Students researched technology-related topics, wrote and compiled their book chapters, and converted those chapters into ebooks using web design software and an open-source ebook creation tool called Calibre.    

1:45-2:15 Active Learning is the Hook: Developing Information Literacy Dispositions in First-Year Calculus

Building dispositions "values, attitudes, and habits of mind" is an integral part of the learning process. The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy provides suggested sets of dispositions for each information literacy concept. But what are some practical strategies we can use to develop student mindsets about information literacy? One way is to embed information literacy assignments into foundational courses that use active, student-centered teaching methods. This presentation will discuss a librarian-faculty collaboration at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo where "learn by doing" library assignments are integrated into Inquiry-based Learning (IBL) Mathematics courses. Attendees will see sample assignments and student work that demonstrates how information literacy dispositions fit well with assignments on effective thinking, and take away ideas for finding new "footholds" in the curriculum.

Westminster College's first-year composition courses have generally been taught in person, with two accompanying information literacy instruction sessions. However, several composition courses have recently been taught online, and the librarians wanted to make sure that the corresponding online information course stayed engaging and interactive. The college's instructional designer and a librarian teamed up to implement the three pillars of the Community of Inquiry theory for online education as well as activities that addressed the new ACRL Information Literacy Framework. The online IL course will now consist of a combination of interactive tutorials, moderated discussion forums, and activities that help merge the ACRL standards and the framework's threshold concepts. Objectives for the session will include offering examples of how the framework can work for in-person and online information literacy instruction; presenting the Community of Inquiry model as a theoretical basis for online learning; and providing resources for Instructional Design best practices.

Librarians at California State University Northridge have spent the previous year experimenting with their new iPad instructional classroom.  The room includes an iPad cart with 32 iPads for student use and an Apple TV that allows librarians to teach untethered.  Over the past year they have developed a set of best practices for teaching with mobile devices that they will share with participants.  Many educational apps are geared towards semester long classes; the presenters will also highlight and demonstrate apps that they have found particularly useful for one-shot library instruction sessions. The workshop will benefit librarians who teach untethered with a tablet, who teach in an iPad classroom, who teach in a traditional computer lab, and anyone interested in converting their classroom from desktop to tablet technology. Participants will be encouraged to bring their own devices to take part in active learning activities using some of the apps demonstrated.