Problem: Student–to–Research Librarian Instructor ratio is 60:1.
Solution: A collaborative effort between the faculty, research librarian, and instructional designer to design and embed online tutorials in the learning management system, Desire2Learn (D2L)…quickly.
It is mid-October and the January 2nd winter quarter start date is fast approaching. Nursing 400: Theories of Nursing will be offered as a hybrid for the first time. The instructional designer and faculty have been working feverishly to produce narrated PowerPoint lectures, embed video clips, write content and assignment instructions, develop rubrics and engaging discussion prompts, and integrate images and graphics. The course hinges on a multistep research-project assignment and the librarian instructional time is vital for students to have a successful course experience.
How will the students become familiar with the massive amount of library resources available to them vital to their research-project assignment? The research librarian usually conducts face-to-face instructional sessions on information literacy (IL) and useful library resources. However, the number of students in the winter cohort is much larger. He figures he needs two to three clones of himself to conduct all the scheduled face-to-face sessions plus advise students and tend to faculty research requests.
In comes the instructional designer. What about embedding online tutorials right into the course so that you can focus on advising students and handling special requests? Ding-ding-ding! Of course, the research librarians have already thought of this. They created a YouTube channel with tutorials about general library resources; but for this course, tutorials are needed that specifically address the research needs of nurses. The librarian, instructional designer, and faculty decide on four topics crucial to nursing students who are at this stage in their study and research novices. After input from the librarian and faculty, we get to work on the scripts and create the accompanying PowerPoint slides. The British accent of the research librarian coupled with his witty humor creates an entertaining and authoritative sounding product.
Now where to place these tutorials? We decide to create a “widget” in D2L that resides on the course home page so that students see it every time they log in and it’s quickly accessible. The faculty clearly directs students within the introductory course announcements to the tutorials that also include a short video introducing the research librarian and providing his contact information. Mid-course, we nervously solicit feedback from students via an embedded survey within the course.
Select Survey Results
6 question survey; n=20
Question 2: Did you feel successful when researching your topic after viewing the tutorials?
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Yes
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95%
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No
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5%
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Not sure
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0%
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Question 3: Given the option, would you have preferred online tutorials, in-person library instruction session, or both?
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Online Tutorials
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50%
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In-person Instruction
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5%
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Both
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45%
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Open-ended Question: Would you change anything in the online tutorials?
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No, I thought the tutorial was very self-explanatory and covered all the necessary topics to adequately navigate through the DePaul library resources.
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I think that everything was well covered
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No, I thought it was enough to get me started, navigating things like this usually requires me to play around in it.
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I thought it was very thorough. I like how it was broken up so that if we forgot something, we could go back and rewatch a section without having to rewatch the whole thing.
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No, I think it would be beneficial to have the tutorials as an overview for an in-person tutorial.
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Conclusion:
In conclusion, it is helpful to look at a more comprehensive study of student content retention and the effectiveness of online tutorials versus face-to-face instruction.
Alison Brettle and Michael Raynor published a paper in Nurse Education Today titled “Developing information literacy skills in pre-registration nurses: An experimental study of teaching methods” (2012) which looked at the question of whether an “online tutorial was as good as face-to-face training for teaching IL [information literacy] skills to students nurses.” (p.2) The study of seventy-seven students added evidence to the previous claim by Carlock and Anderson (2007) that suggests online tutorials and face-to-face instruction of IL and research skills are equally effective methods.
The small student sample from NSG 400 seems to validate these findings.
We will continue to iterate the online tutorials based on student feedback and performance. It is also important to listen to that 5% who do not find the tutorials equally as helpful as face-to-face instruction; where are the gaps? We will look for solutions that capitalize on the scalability of online tutorials while integrating the irreplaceable value of face-to-face instruction. We can’t clone the research librarian, but we will continue to seek other solutions.
References:
Brettle, A., Raynor, M. Developing information literacy skills in pre-registration nurses: An experimental study of teaching methods, Nurse Edc. Today (2012), doi: 10.1016/j.nedt.2011.12.003
