ACRL in the Rose City

ACRL 2015 in Portland, OR, was an opportunity to gather a wealth of new ideas and insights, connect with great people and talk about some common challenges. The range of sessions offered at ACRL is so vast that I was able to spend almost all my time at presentations and discussions oriented around instructional design. Here are some of the highlights from my experience of ACRL in the Rose City.

Innovation and learning

I was really hoping to get some insight into the relationship between design and user experience. What’s the impact of design principles and different kinds of digital object on comprehension and learning? With the the very last presentation I attended, late Saturday morning, I struck gold: librarians at the University of Michigan described how they applied principles of universal design in their conversion of a print text to a web text appropriate for online reading. It was a clear and thoughtful illustration of concepts like visual hierarchy, color and contrast, chunking text and wayfinding.

Also useful: a poster by a librarian at CUNY-Brockport explained how her library had applied findings from user research to design its v2 LibGuides, including (gasp!) left-side navigation and (another gasp!) left-side profile boxes. There’s only a very modest amount of research on web layout for navigation, but what’s out there is very interesting. Watch this space for more on this.

Elsewhere, there were several sessions on exciting new objects and platforms, but strangely detached from the user perspective. I felt the rush of techno-phoria as I learned about an embeddable edX-based courseware platform! A mobile adventure game for orientations! A CMS extension for interactive tutorials! This was ACRL 2015’s bleeding edge. But I would have got even more out of these sessions if they had explored in more detail the impact of these new tools on student learning and performance.

Production, efficiencies and economies of scale

Instead, there was a common focus on production-side processes. Above all, there’s a need for cost-effective ways to produce high-cost platforms and objects.

Strategy 1: collaborate with other libraries. We’re all making similar research guides, screencasts, tutorials, etc, often distinguished only by the local branding, so how can we collaborate to generate some economies of scale?

In Oklahoma, seven libraries have been working together to produce a shared set of Captivate tutorials. A long-term partnership made it possible to overcome limitations such as finances (Captivate currently costs approx. $1,000 per license) and server space. In New York, four libraries formed a similar consortium to harness the efficiencies of collaboration.

Strategy 2: collaborate across campus. Seek out the instructional support and technology specialists in your library or other units. At an UnCon roundtable, University of South Florida librarian Carrie Moran described how she had formed an ad hoc “V-group” to bring together colleagues working on videos.

Strategy 3: find the money – Mellon grants, Teagle grants, IMLS grants… It sounds like there are numerous ways to bring in funds for ed tech projects.

Strategy 4: borrow. It’s natural to want some kind of ownership over the learning objects we use, but there’s also merit in recognizing in the expertise of others. It’s also (again) a question of resources. When I worked in the library of a small, rural state college, I saw no shame in linking to other libraries’ videos because I did not have the time to produce my own. Also, I heard an excellent point about borrowing: it’s an opportunity to talk with students about intellectual property, digital assets and citation.

Interactivity and its discontents

While instructional design at the bleeding edge (see above) is all about interactivity, in some areas it felt like this is a principle that maybe is not yet well established. I heard questions about whether interactive tutorials have a superior effect on student learning. (They do, though there seems to be plenty of scope for more research that will substantiate this.) But I suspect questions about the value of interactive objects are really questions about the value of investing the resources needed to create them.

More thought-provoking was a video project using the choose-your-own-adventure concept to let the user steer their way through a set of YouTube videos. The videos were entertaining and probably highly effective in using humor to engage with students. But the interactive element – in the video that was demonstrated, at least – didn’t require, develop or test any knowledge or cognitive skill.

Maybe it’s helpful to distinguish between different kinds of interactivity, in a similar way to distinguishing between different kinds of assessment: formative interactivity, summative interactivity, interactivity that maintains engagement? When working in Guide on the Side, my library’s tutorial platform, I try to think about the value of different quiz elements. Is this designed to reinforce memory? to ensure practise? to assess? to break up the presentation of information? Maybe there should be a taxonomy of tutorial interactivity…

Digital objects: what shall we build?

So we’re creating digital objects – let’s start with “what?” A recurring conversation at ACRL 2015 centered on whether to focus on technical skills, like knowing the really important bells and whistles in database x, or conceptual skills, more closely related to information literacy. Resources are finite, so where should an instructional design librarian invest for maximum return?

I heard some folks advocate for the conceptual, “because that’s the general direction of instruction today”. I heard stronger arguments for the technical, especially the suggestion that the conceptual should be reserved for face-to-face instruction. This is a robust formula where some pre-class flipping is possible – it’s the approach my library uses for our ENGS 001 sessions and it works well – though one potential hazard is changes in database interfaces.

The New York consortium (see above) also suggested a discipline-based distinction that may be useful. They floated the idea that standalone objects may be suited to STEM and professionally-oriented programs, whereas the liberal arts – given their emphasis on person-to-person discussion and negotiation of meaning – may need objects that can be integrated into blended instruction.

Embedding

Or “electronic performance support”, as it appeared in one poster session. Oh yes.

My ACRL got off to a lively start on the Thursday morning as librarians from the Universities of Miami and Wyoming energetically tapped the room’s collective wisdom on sustainable embedding. Strategies for success?

Create a human presence through photos and life stories.
Relate library content to upcoming assignments.
Blocks! Blocks for the library, blocks for subject resources.
Design your presence as a “course within a course”, including objectives and assessment.
As a long-term plan, seek to shift your role from course support to collaborative instructional design to collaborative curriculum development.

Reading strategies

Reading is important. That’s obvious for librarians, right? But we devote all kinds of resources to delivery and discovery, and much less to comprehension and use. A year ago, working on the Reference desk, I helped a student feeling anxious and frustrated because the assigned reading was too technical for him to understand. He really wanted to do the reading, but felt he had been left to do it without the help he needed. In situations like that, we need reading strategies that we can share with the student and we need to know where else the student can get help.

So I was excited to learn about reading strategies from Margy MacMillan and Stephanie Rosenblatt. They made important points about student reading:

Only 24% of students do the required reading for classes…
… and many of those may be reading without comprehension or engagement.
Consider your library’s financial investment in items that aren’t being read or understood.
The integral role of reading is implicit throughout the ACRL Framework.

And they encouraged us to present college reading to students as a task of translation. These sources were not written for you, they are not in your language. Invest the necessary effort to translate them into language you understand.

I look forward to learning more about specific strategies, especially post-discovery strategies. What are the best practices for supporting that student who has found relevant sources, but can’t read them? What are the strategies that can be applied in that moment? How does the reference librarian’s role relate to those of the subject specialist librarian, the instructor, the TA and other academic support services?

And I look forward to reading more of Margy and Stephanie’s research. Here’s their blog: https://readingstratsacrl2015.wordpress.com

Whither the Tree Octopus?

The tragically endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.

I didn’t spot a single Tree Octopus during my stay in the Pacific Northwest, dammit. This made me wonder whether we understand the Tree Octopus as well as we think we do. Is it nocturnal? Does it migrate south for the winter? Is it close to extinction? Could it be time for the PNW Tree Octopus to retire from information literacy instruction?

So many questions. As always, ACRL has given me lots of ideas and new perspectives to take home. And it didn’t rain once.

Sessions I attended:

Sustaining and enhancing embedded library instruction in the learning management system
Session format: Panel session, Technology

Partners in design: Consortial collaboration for digital learning object creation
Session format: Panel session, Teaching & Learning

REUSE: Existing knowledge in library instruction
Session format: TechConnect, Teaching & Learning

“They made me do research!”: Applying the choose-your-own-adventure model to interactive video tutorials
Session format: TechConnect, Teaching & Learning

Flipping information literacy: The logic of a SPOC (Small Private Online Course)
Session format: TechConnect, Teaching & Learning

Achieving big city dreams at small town libraries: How seven regional college libraries used collaboration and Adobe Captivate to create an online information literacy tutorial program
Session format: Panel session, Assessment

Choose your own Edventure: Creating interactive and scalable orientation activities with EdventureBuilder
Session format: TechConnect, Technology

Interactive elearning within reach: Using H5P to create HTML5 open education resources
Session format: TechConnect, Technology

Instructional design
Session format: UnCon, Roundtable

The topography of learning: Using cognitive mapping to evolve and innovate in the academic library
Session format: Panel session, Assessment