Because These Things Will Change: Updating a COVID-Era Asynchronous Learning Object
Type of Presentation
Individual paper/presentation
Conference Strand
Media Literacy
Target Audience
Higher Education
Second Target Audience
K-12
Relevance
The LibWizard tutorials created by Barnhart and LaPier provide support for students in research and information literacy. The goal of the resources is to teach students how to start the research process, which entails finding, evaluating, organizing, using, and communicating information. The tutorials explain how to navigate the university library’s services and resources including physical and digital collections, how to evaluate sources as students find them, and what to do with those sources as they complete research based assignments.
Proposal
In 2021, my co-author presented at GICOIL about LibraryDen, an asynchronous information literacy course they created during the COVID-19 lockdown to provide support for students in research and information literacy. The course has had initial successes: since Fall 2020 more than 2000 students have been enrolled in it, LibraryDen won the ALA-Library Instruction Roundtable Innovation in Instruction Award in 2021, and the course with its associated texts is serving as a model being adapted into Spanish by four university libraries in Mexico. What started as a pandemic-era tool has proven to be useful beyond the moment of crisis; to continue its effectiveness the creators sought to update and improve it. In this presentation, I will show how I worked with my co-author to evaluate, update, and improve this learning object through a combination of applying best practices in pedagogy, identifying and eliminating redundancies, and close examination of student feedback. Based on this examination, the presenters determined that one of the biggest flaws was that this resource often relied on rote memorization rather than application of learning. This presentation explains the strategies used to create a more interactive and engaging resource, primarily through the use of Springshare LibWizard tutorials to transform the course modules into interactive tutorials which simultaneously display course content with self-evaluation questions. This formatting serves to reduce cognitive load and allows for more application based questions to be introduced. The benefit of these modifications is that students are now asked to engage with course content and apply their learning, rather than simply repeating back presented information. We hope to incorporate the use of LibWizard tutorials into other areas in the library and elsewhere on campus. The goal of this presentation is to show other users how to utilize LibWizard to create interactive, asynchronous learning materials that support active learning in the digital age.
Presentation Description
University of West Georgia librarian Anne Barnhart and MLIS student Trinity LaPier show how they incorporated LibWizard tutorials to create interactive, asynchronous learning materials that support learning in the digital age. The presenters discuss the process of creating and updating this Open Educational Resource (OER) and how other libraries can create similar resources or adopt and modify their work (licensed CC BY-NC-SA).
Keywords
LibWizard; Asynchronous Learning; Online Tutorials; Student Engagement; Open Educational Resources
Publication Type and Release Option
Presentation (Open Access)
Recommended Citation
LaPier, Trinity and Barnhart, Anne, "Because These Things Will Change: Updating a COVID-Era Asynchronous Learning Object" (2024). Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. 5.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/gaintlit/2024/2024/5
Because These Things Will Change: Updating a COVID-Era Asynchronous Learning Object
In 2021, my co-author presented at GICOIL about LibraryDen, an asynchronous information literacy course they created during the COVID-19 lockdown to provide support for students in research and information literacy. The course has had initial successes: since Fall 2020 more than 2000 students have been enrolled in it, LibraryDen won the ALA-Library Instruction Roundtable Innovation in Instruction Award in 2021, and the course with its associated texts is serving as a model being adapted into Spanish by four university libraries in Mexico. What started as a pandemic-era tool has proven to be useful beyond the moment of crisis; to continue its effectiveness the creators sought to update and improve it. In this presentation, I will show how I worked with my co-author to evaluate, update, and improve this learning object through a combination of applying best practices in pedagogy, identifying and eliminating redundancies, and close examination of student feedback. Based on this examination, the presenters determined that one of the biggest flaws was that this resource often relied on rote memorization rather than application of learning. This presentation explains the strategies used to create a more interactive and engaging resource, primarily through the use of Springshare LibWizard tutorials to transform the course modules into interactive tutorials which simultaneously display course content with self-evaluation questions. This formatting serves to reduce cognitive load and allows for more application based questions to be introduced. The benefit of these modifications is that students are now asked to engage with course content and apply their learning, rather than simply repeating back presented information. We hope to incorporate the use of LibWizard tutorials into other areas in the library and elsewhere on campus. The goal of this presentation is to show other users how to utilize LibWizard to create interactive, asynchronous learning materials that support active learning in the digital age.
