Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: How LibGuides Helped Us to Meet our Information Literacy Goals with our First-Year Students

Type of Presentation

Poster Session (45 minutes)

Target Audience

Higher Education

Location

CGC Lobby

Proposal

When curriculum changes came to Lagrange College’s freshman seminar course (we call it “Cornerstone”), we librarians lost our ability to give face-to-face library instruction to every section, due largely to the logistics of space, scheduling, and the availability of technology. As a result, we had to adopt a new approach to library instruction for our first-year students.

After trying a couple of different methods that were time consuming and ultimately fell flat, we became inspired by the article “Using LibGuides for an Information Literacy Tutorial 2.0” by the librarians at Bloomsburg University in the July 2010 issue of College and Research Library News. We set to work creating our own information literacy tutorial using LibGuides, working together to tailor the content to the needs of our first-year students. At the end of the tutorial, students would complete a ten-question assessment using Google Forms.

We launched our completed tutorial and assessment as a required Cornerstone assignment to the incoming 2015 class. The students completed the online tutorial outside of class, freeing us from the seemingly herculean task of trying to meet each student face-to-face. Further, the Flubaroo add-on allowed us to grade all of the assessments in just a few minutes’ time, and we used the results to examine weaknesses in our instruction and pinpoint areas for improvement within the tutorial.

Presentation Description

This poster presentation will highlight how we created our own information literacy tutorial and assessment using LibGuides and Google forms. We will discuss our successes and roadblocks as well as our experience of building this tutorial from the ground up.

Keywords

LibGuides, research tutorial, first-year students, assessment, Google forms, library instruction

Publication Type and Release Option

Presentation (Open Access)

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Sep 30th, 12:00 PM Sep 30th, 5:30 PM

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: How LibGuides Helped Us to Meet our Information Literacy Goals with our First-Year Students

CGC Lobby

When curriculum changes came to Lagrange College’s freshman seminar course (we call it “Cornerstone”), we librarians lost our ability to give face-to-face library instruction to every section, due largely to the logistics of space, scheduling, and the availability of technology. As a result, we had to adopt a new approach to library instruction for our first-year students.

After trying a couple of different methods that were time consuming and ultimately fell flat, we became inspired by the article “Using LibGuides for an Information Literacy Tutorial 2.0” by the librarians at Bloomsburg University in the July 2010 issue of College and Research Library News. We set to work creating our own information literacy tutorial using LibGuides, working together to tailor the content to the needs of our first-year students. At the end of the tutorial, students would complete a ten-question assessment using Google Forms.

We launched our completed tutorial and assessment as a required Cornerstone assignment to the incoming 2015 class. The students completed the online tutorial outside of class, freeing us from the seemingly herculean task of trying to meet each student face-to-face. Further, the Flubaroo add-on allowed us to grade all of the assessments in just a few minutes’ time, and we used the results to examine weaknesses in our instruction and pinpoint areas for improvement within the tutorial.