Narratives of Academic Librarians: Chapter 1: Instructional Tool 1

Chapter 1: Instructional tool 1

What I chose to do is not necessarily [provide chapters] chronologically, but the tools that I use throughout my career, essentially.

But there was some chronology built into this. 

[Instructional tool 1] was something that we used heavily early in my career. And then later on, we transitioned into other tools, I can get into that in a little bit. 

I guess a little bit of context, when I started.

I started back [ a few years ago]. 

The very first several months, I was working from home, and all the classes pretty much- they were moving online. 

We had no- we had little, I guess, guidance or little clue what's going to happen in the fall, whether we're going to be back to campus, everything's going to be remote, we just didn't know. 

Anyhow, I was primarily at the time working with our [freshman intro to college] team and at the time, our team had [X] librarians- one person was the coordinator, and then the other were librarians [specific to this area]. 

It was interesting, you probably know this from talking to other folks- that team, they are tasked with providing library instructions for students who have just arrived on campus for first year students. 

They work with English instructors, so they will come in several times a year to teach them about how to use the library, how to use the databases, the catalog and how to do library, basic library introduction to research, essentially. 

And we have some librarians, and one person is the coordinator.

The other people, even though they were part of the team, were on XXXX contracts, which means that they don't work during summer. 

So essentially, during the first couple of months, I was mostly working with the coordinator.

The coordinator was interested in collaborating with me to create some digital learning objects or tutorials- several library tutorials to help with this group of students. 

That was the time where we had to research what would be the best tool at the time to create those tutorials. 

We looked at several different tools. Because we were remote, it was difficult to gauge the world climate or the culture. Ideally, I think - it will be more ideal if we have some better tools that we can leverage that have more functionalities, like articulate and some other all the industry standard software, but we stumbled upon [instructional tool 1], which was free.

I had just started working there.

I don't want to immediately start asking the library [administrator], “hey, can you give us money to do whatever?” 

I don't know. 

I felt a little awkward because everyone was working from home, but I don't know.

It was a little bit weird.

So anyhow, we looked at some other tutorials put together by other libraries just to do some background research to see what some of the tools are out there, what are some of the common tutorials that other folks made. 

We stumbled upon [instructional tool 1], which was the free tool that was [open source] available. And this was used by [ prominent university] libraries.

We thought that [instructional tool 1] has a lot of potential, even though it's free, and we decided that, well, maybe we could look into it, even though I have never used it in my previous jobs and also in my graduate work. 

We decided to look into it, and I thought that it has a lot of potential, so we decided to give it a try. During that summer, we created several tutorials using [instructional tool 1] and they were all interactive tutorials, which is what we want rather than just making a video for [students] to watch or having some interactivity, like a quiz, like something that they need to click, things like that. 

And then because we're just mostly the coordinator and I, at the time, there was a lot of back and forth going on throughout the whole development phase.

Then shortly before classes started, the other folks joined us, and then we decided we had a team going. 

That's when we were able to get everyone involved- everyone was able to look at the tutorials that we made thus far and provide feedback and more- back and forth design and development. We didn't really do any usability testing or anything like that. 

There was a lot going on because of the pandemic and a lot of lesson planning.

There was just so much unknown going on because we were also recalled back to office at the beginning of the semester with very little short notice. 

Decisions were made higher up, beyond my pay grade.

I don't need to get into that.

And so anyhow, we made several tutorials and they were pretty well received amongst the librarians.

I don't know whether they were well received by the students or not, because I wasn't involved in teaching- they were involved in teaching. 

We didn't really talk about that after they were made.

They loaded into their coursework back in the days they were using [a learning management system]. 

Later on, we switched to [a different learning management system], which was like [a few] years ago. 

Some tutorials I've made include one on how to read the catalog record, one virtual library tour.

That was super time consuming. 

Also, one citation style, and one video on popular and scholarly articles.

First, I use [video capture and editing software] to make the video and then [Instructional tool 1] and add an interactivity to it.

There was one other, there was one other tutorial that used a different software. 

That was a different story.

So back to the virtual library tour.

They had this kind of tour tutorial where if you load in enough images, you can build in different scenes and then allow users to click to go to different scenes. 

At the time, some students were not coming to the building, and so we had to think creatively rather than just having images, we figured that maybe if we have enough images, so they can use your mouse to control to look around to look up and down, left and right, they can pan, they can tilt. 

We thought that would be pretty nice for the students who have, but it turns out to be super time consuming because we at the time I didn't actually didn't know that we had a [specialty] camera in one of the departments which would have made the whole thing a lot smoother, more effective. I guess more efficient use of time. 

What I ended up doing with [Instructional tool 1]- at the time using it for the images allows you to take individual images and then you combine all of those images into a [specialty] image.

But then I had to do that in Photoshop and then there were a lot of errors that I had to manually correct and so anyhow it didn't look very good.

It took me a lot of time, but later on I was able to get a [specialty] camera from a different department.

Anyhow that was the only thing that just took so much time and I just felt like the amount of time we spent to make the tutorial probably wasn’t quite worth it now

that I think back to it.

But other than that, everything else worked pretty smoothly. 

I think that's pretty much mostly what I want to talk about [Instructional tool 1].

I suppose I can probably just also add that during this part of my career, I feel like... I was very productive during this time, I guess because we were able to get a lot of quality content created.

Later on I feel like we lost a little bit of focus because...there was something that has to do with how I was not entirely sure how I was supposed to work with the rest of the library. 

(Whether) that has to do with the whole pandemic and other related issues, I just feel like [initially] I received a lot of tasks assignments to work out and later on they started to fall off and that I was working on some other tasks that are not necessarily related to [instructional technology and design].

This was the feedback I received from [supervisor] as well.

We hired you as [instructional technology and design librarian] so we preferred for you to keep on working on that because you have the talent and expertise to work on this.

But that's a different story. But yeah, I just want to quickly mention that [initially] I feel like I had a pretty productive [initial period] as far as my instructional design work goes. 

I guess I can also say that a little bit more context, background context of where I was and how I ended up being here. Prior to working here, after I got my degree in [instructional technology and design], I worked at several separate corporations. 

One was a smaller corporation. At the time I was working with the [human resources] department, but we had several in-house instructional designers and I was working with them to create content for our department. 

I feel like I really learned quite a bit from those experiences, and mostly because my colleagues at the time were very, very talented.

I felt I was able to learn a lot from them.

After that, I worked at a different corporation for a short time. 

I can just tell you what it was.

You can't choose to put it in the chapter or not.

I don't care.

Either way, it's [a large company], which was a lot bigger than the first company I work at.

So, going into [large company], I kind of expected that it's a multibillion-dollar company, and they will have a lot of talent in-house. 

I will be able to learn from the new people I will be working with.

Which turned out that it was not quite the experience I was hoping for.

I wouldn't say that folks I was working with are not talented. 

That's not what I was trying to say.

The work that everyone was doing was very different from my first job.

I was one of the [instructional technicians/designers] at the time.

They were essentially telling me that they were not really doing instructional design work. 

They are just glorified writers, editors.

They were writing and editing a lot of training materials for the new people who are joining the [large company] workforce.

That was a little bit different from my first job. 

And I thought that was kind of interesting.

Later, I joined this library and there were a lot of things I felt like was kind of...

There were a lot of things I anticipated coming out of the graduate school and coming out from that program, there were a lot of things that really ring true from that program.

Sometimes you have to work with a client and they don't necessarily know what they want, or they don't necessarily know what's the best platform or software. 

So those are the things that as the [instructional technologists/designers], we have to provide guidance, or they have a very specific idea of what a good design is, but that's not necessarily true. 

You can help them with conveying to them why you can improve upon their idea, why you can make it [better], how you can make it better, essentially.

There were a lot of things I learned, that just reinforced that during my [initial time in the library], some things I learned in school, where you have to work with real life clients and just real people.

Understand that back in the day, we were doing a lot of small group work, working with classmates, which was a little bit different.