The relationship between Librarians  and information literacy has gone through a significant transition in the last five to ten years. We now deal with a huge amount of information in a very wide range of formats, from Books to eBooks, Journals to Bibliographic databases.

The swift change in the services that we provide for our users means that even academics have been left behind and out of touch with our services. As a result, we are increasingly required (and rightly so) to introduce and re-invent the use of Library services to students and academics. This is no easy task as you would have already experienced; has anyone successfully run a lunch time training session with a full attendance? And how often have you seen that glazed over look from students when presenting technologies that can really benefit their assignments?

In my opinion (and many others agree) students will no longer respond to or remember the information that they are given in traditional research sessions involving a powerpoint and handouts. Increasingly advantage is gained by seeking students (and now staff) in their most likely learning environments, making information available online in support of the personal touch that librarians successfully provide. Librarians are specialists at helping people find information, and it is essential that library users can find the support of a librarian in their hectic every day lives.

In my role as Electronic services librarian I was given the task to update the ways in which we taught information skills to students. At the time the Library had very little integration with Moodle (our VLE), which meant that students were directed through our website for extra support and guidance to our research and induction sessions. This had some drawbacks:

• Students were expected to remember our URL, as well as how to access the site on campus.
• The target information was buried within a site already saturated with content, meaning that students could quickly become confused.
• Our website represented one extra service for students to remember to use at the college, and was not widely supported by lecturers.

As a result we looked at providing our research sessions with the use of our VLE, providing the following advantages:

• Students were already familiar with the VLE, and had an excellent understanding of navigating around its layout.
• Information can be built within a course page meaning that staff and students have little choice but to access the information provided by the Library.
• The password protected environment allows Librarians to provide students with authentication info to electronic resources more securely than through an open domain website.
• Technologies already exist through Moodle that would take some time to set-up through our hard-coded XHTML site. For example discussion forums, file uploads, quizes can all be set-up within minutes and work very well alongside content in Moodle.

Our existing research sessions for students involved providing students with a short introductory talk, supported with a handout including information and activities. As this worked well our decision was to not let Moodle change this approach, but create a Moodle course that hosted activities electronically, as well as give students access to the paper copy in PDF or Doc. format for download.

We often found in our old sessions that students would leave behind or lose their handouts after a research sessions but Moodle solved this issue. Staff were already aware of the content we had added to the site and therefore had prepared the students beforehand. Students were also confronted by the material each time the logged into their course for the rest of the year, and would only lose access if somebody with permission deletes it.

The quiz function proved the most useful. During the activity students were asked questions about the research they had done. The answers students provided were set-up to be emailed directly to the librarian. The librarian was then able to check over the answers briefly after the session, getting a good idea of whether the students had learnt anything.

Using Camstudio (see my previous post) I was able to make tutorial videos of how to use our electronic service to support my presentation. These videos were then embedded into the activity to support students if they weren’t paying attention during the session.

I would love to provide screenshots but I now work elsewhere – look out for a similar post soon on Blackboard and research sessions!

Tags: moodle, research, vle