Online tutorial at University of Leeds

With last week's focus on embedded librarians, and this week's peek at librarians creating tutorials for distance education students, it is becoming all more obvious just how much of an active a role that librarians are taking in creating information literate students.

In the article, Creating an Online Tutorial to Support Information Literacy and Academic Skills Development, Sara Thornes (2012) discusses the process that librarians at the University of Leeds undertook in order to develop a tutorial to help acclimate distance learners to information literacy skills.  An important theme in this article, as with articles from last week, as well, has been that librarians work very closely with faculty in other departments in order to ensure that resources are responding to needs of the actual students and professors.  This is important, so that all the departments in a university are sending the same message to students, and to ensure that actual problems that are coming up in class work are being addressed by these library initiatives.

In the case of designing this tutorial, librarians were in close contact with professors from the School of Geology, as well as learning technologists (pp. 85; 89).  The tutorial was designed to ensure that students had a one-stop resource for learning and reviewing information on topics that stressed planning searches, advanced searching tools and techniques, evaluating sources, writing and note taking for research papers, and citations (pp. 86).  These topics form the basic core of information literacy of which we have been learning the various ways in which librarians have been working to find innovative ways to instruct students on.

This tutorial was designed so that students did not have to sit through a linear lecture, but rather, could choose the sections that they felt they needed the most help on and to repeat any section as many times as they needed.  In addition, student learning was enforced and evaluated through the use of interactive quizzes and exercises during each module (pp. 87-88).  This kind of flexibility is one of the advantages that this kind of electronic learning object offers that can not be found in a typical workshop.

An important take away from the lessons of embedded librarians, librarians creating online tutorials, and LibGuides is that computer technology offers a unique challenge to librarians in an academic setting. A common fear is that Google is being too heavily relied upon, and that students no longer use print resources at the library. As a result, it is assumed that libraries are becoming only social venues where students fill up on coffee and socialize between classes.  It is important to recognize the changing environment of the library, and to realize that to some extent these observations are not entirely fabrications. However, this is not, in itself, driving librarians from their jobs. On the contrary, students still need resources to help develop their information literacy skills, both with print media and with electronic resources as well.  The librarian's job still remains much the same as it previously has been, only now with more challenges and new tools at their disposal.

Thornes, S. L., (2012). Creating an online tutorial to support information literacy and academic skills development. Journal of Information Literacy, 6(1), pp. 82-95,
http://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL/article/view/LLC-V6-I1-2012-3