Narratives of Academic Librarians: Chapter 4: Instructional Tool 4

Chapter 4: Instructional Tool 4

Yeah, chapter four is the, let's see, [Instructional Tool 4]. When I was in my [graduate]program, we were taught that there were pretty much two industry standard authoring tool. One is [Instructional Tool X]. One is [Instructional Tool 4]. 

And so [Instructional Tool X] is actually something that we used quite a bit at [previous corporate employer]. When I was working with an army of instructional designers, everyone was using [Instructional Tool X]. [Instructional Tool 4] was something that I have not had a lot of exposure to, honestly, but I did learn it. 

I didn't learn as much as I was supposed to.

I got a little exposure from graduate school and then a little bit after graduate school in the first job, the job I had before [previous corporate employer]. 

I actually had [Instructional Tool X], I actually purchased it, so I don't know if you look at either of those two tools.

Long story short, [Instructional Tool X] is a one-time purchase.

Once you buy it, you have the perpetual license, you don't need to pay it again. 

At the time, I paid close to $400 when I was in my program.

I had it on my personal computer. And then [Instructional Tool 4] was an annual license. You had to buy it every single year. 

We had several different licenses, but if you are working in an educational setting, I think it still costs you $500 per year. I think that's the one reason I chose not to use [Instructional Tool 4] during my program because we all have to use either of those two tools. 

I don't know, I just feel like 500 dollars seems to be a lot of money, rather than paying like a one-time 400 or 300. I don't exactly remember how much it was, but those were the two industry standards. 

And later on, the library team I was on decided to not move on from [Instructional Tool 1] because it was still free. There was still a lot of functionality provided by the tool. 

We decided that there was this tutorial that there's a lot of interactivity that they wanted to build into the tutorial. That's when I decided that well, it's time for us to get [Instructional Tool 4], even though it's not a cheap purchase. 

We reached out to the [head library administrator], and they were able to provide us the license to do the work that we were doing. Once we had the license, we were able to use it to create several different tutorials related to the library team, the classes that they were teaching, and also several workshops that the library was doing at the time. 

Some time ago, the library team came up with this initiative- they called it a [information literacy teaching session]. Rather than having those [area-specific] librarians teaching a session, what they proposed is that any faculty, may feel free to come up with a topic and present it as a teaching session. 

And so, as long as some aspects of the teaching session are related to [information and information literacy], any student can attend that particular teaching session to get class credit. 

That's an initiative that was started and it's been ongoing and so I have used [Instructional Tool 4] to create several tutorials for those [teaching sessions] because we do have students who are remote who are not here on campus. They still need to be able to attend one of those workshops. 

Sometimes not everything is in person. Sometimes there is a hybrid option where they can join remotely but the time doesn't work for them= or for whatever reason they couldn't attend a session. 

I use [Instructional Tool 4] to create several tutorials or sometimes work with the person who created these workshops.

They provide me with a lesson plan or storyboard.

They gave me the lesson plan, they gave me all the interactivities that they want to put on there, and they put everything on a PowerPoint. Then they send it to me.

We were able to use [Instructional Tool 4] to create several of those tutorials, then getting some feedback from each other, then uploading that.

It's just a link and any students can click on the link to go through the entirety of the content.

Then at the end there's like a URL usually throughout the whole workshop tutorial.

There are several quizzes or things that they need to complete in order to get credit for attending these workshops. 

Let's see, I think if there's anything else I want to cover.

Yeah, I guess it's because it wasn't a cheap purchase.

I don't know, requesting money is always - I don't really feel comfortable asking for money.

We did talk about whether at some point we need to provide justification for all the content we created and whether it worthwhile for the library to keep reinvesting that money into a particular tool or software.

We did talk about that and we have been thinking a lot about gathering student feedback for assessment purposes to make the case that this is pretty impactful for student learning, for student success, things like that.

There's a lot of discussion on that but we haven't changed the way we've been approaching these tutorials.

Usually it's like they give me the content on a PowerPoint, tell me the content that they want to put on there, and then give me any activities that the students need to work on.

Then I load them in, build it, design it, develop it, and then send it back to our librarians for feedback.

Overall it was a pretty iterative approach back and forth.

Then once everyone was satisfied, we uploaded it to the server so the whole approach hasn't really changed much and it's just a matter of whether we want to gather more student feedback, more assessment data in the future, in case the library administration decides to ask us for justification.

 We will be able to provide it whenever it comes up.