Help Students Help Themselves
Part of my job as web services librarian is to make using the website easier to use so that students can focus more of their energies on the critical thinking and evaluating stage of information seeking. With over 100 databases available to choose from, it can be overwhelming for students to know where to start. Last year, I led a project to create Research Guides to pull together resources from a variety of formats to make it easier for students to know where to begin their research (see Appendix: Research Guides). This project is ongoing and guides will continue to be developed based on student and faculty input.
Similarly, if students get stuck and need assistance, it should be easy for them to get help from a librarian. I revised the Ask a Librarian page so that students who need immediate help from a librarian can easily see where help is available (see Appendix: Ask a Librarian). Finally, a link to the Ask a Librarian webpage was added to the header in the library template so that it can be found from any page on the library website.
Make Website Accessible to Students from a Range of Educational Backgrounds
One major goals of our recent website redesign was to clean up the language used on the website to make it more accessible to novice and experienced library website users. I developed a style guide for the website to create consistency across pages to make pages easier to scan. One difference between low-literacy and high-literacy website users is that low-literacy users tend to read every word on the page, whereas advanced users tend to scan (Nielson, 1995). Writing for the web involves creating headings to make pages easier to scan, as well as cleaning up the writing to help those less experienced website users who do read every word. In the redesign, we also removed many pages that were not adding value to the website to better highlight those pages that were. Here are the results of online readability testing on the website after the redesign, as well as a list of overall accomplishments (see Appendix: Website Redesign).
Part of the redesign was to eliminate library lingo from the website or using the idea of I + 1, use language students are comfortable with to teach them library lingo. So, instead of just research databases, we added “articles and more” after the library lingo to explain what can be found with this search tool. Here are some additional examples:
- MelCat –> Borrowing from Other Libraries (this page is an intermediary page which explains about both MelCat and ILL)
- Place a hold –> Request a book
- Research Databases –> Research Databases (Articles & More)
- Library Catalog –> Library Catalog (Books & More)
- Serials Solutions –> eJournals & eBooks
- MelCat logo in Catalog –> Search other Michigan libraries (MelCat)
Related to this was improving the organization of pages. Previously many of our pages had links listed in alphabetical order. This only works when patrons are looking for known items. In fact, on many of our pages, listing pages in order of importance would be most useful organizational method. For example, the off-campus access page was rearranged to put most frequently asked questions first.
Build On What Students Already Know
I explained that in the website redesign, we matched natural language with library lingo. Similarly, in library instruction, I try to provide students with input that is a little bit beyond what they already know and to link what they know with the unfamiliar. I explain what a database is by relating it to the database that most students are already familiar with, Facebook. When I am teaching students about the tools available in databases, I explain that they can save articles to print or email at the end of their search, similar to using the shopping cart in Amazon or another online shopping site. When I teach students to brainstorming synonyms before they search, I ask students them what words they might need to use to find a lawyer or a car repair person in the phone book (attorney or automobile mechanic). Finally, I use an image of a pop can to see how many different words students can think of that describe the can. They are usually surprised that they can think of so many words from soda, to pop, to carbonated beverage. When they realize that there are so many different ways to describe a simple object, such as a pop can, they start to understand that they are even more ways to describe the more abstract concepts that they are researching.
Encourage Participation/Active Learning
One of the most challenging aspects of teaching one shot information literacy sessions is to build rapport and actively engage students in the session. I try to build rapport by using student names throughout the session. I set expectations for participation at the beginning of the session by giving students a quick quiz question to start out with. I also try to lower the students’ affective filters by allowing them to participate electronically. I have started to use Google Documents for students to brainstorm keywords. This method allows students who might be reluctant to speak in front of the whole class the opportunity to participate. I ask for volunteers throughout the session and have started to carry bright pink Reporter cards to each session. Each row gets a card and they have to choose a Reporter to share what they discussed before I call on their row. This helps set the expectation that participation is not optional, but also allows students to be prepared to speak.
I believe that active learning is the key to student learning and engagement. There are two active learning activities that I have developed that I have found to be successful with students (see Appendix: Active Learning). Both activities involve students working with a partner or a small group to solve a problem.
ASSESS THE EFFECTIVENESS OF MY TEACHING/THE WEBSITE
I use a variety of methods to assess my teaching skills. In the past, I used a research tips blog which functioned as a one minute paper for students to share the most important thing they learned during the session (see Appendix: Research Tips from Students). Also, I usually give a brief quiz in the middle of class to assess learning. Finally, at the end of the session, I give students a quiz in ANGEL. This is invaluable because it allows me to see which areas I am teaching well and where I have room for improvement. Sometimes a very quiet class performs better than expected or a very talkative class does not perform as well. In the future, I would like to be able to combine the use of the one minute paper and the ANGEL quiz to have both qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate my teaching. I would like to be able to give students a pre-test.
To assess the website the effectiveness of the website, I use tools such as Google Analytics, results from the Google Custom Search Engine set up to search the Library website, and Crazy Egg.
Google Analytics can show you where visitors to your site are coming from. For example, I found that much of the traffic to the Fire Science Research guide was coming from the LCC Fire Science Department website. Also, in the past year, we had 1,675 visits from students from Paradise Valley Community College because this library links to our Citing Sources guide. For now, we are focusing on getting more links to library webpages across campus. The Assessment Center added a link to our Finding Practice Tests webpage to help students prepare for placement tests. Tutoring Services added links to our research guides on their study resources page. I am currently working to get links to our Research Guides from relevant department websites.
Crazy Egg is a program that generates heatmaps of pages on your website. We used it to help us see what parts of our site were hot and what parts were not being used. Some of the results led to simple changes. For example, the most popular link on the Students page was the link to Research Guides, so we moved this link to the top of the page. I observed that a link on the Ask a Librarian Page promoting our collaborative virtual reference was the hottest link on the page and I did not want to promote it above our internal chat reference. So, I removed the link and instead directed students to the chat box.
Beyond helping us make changes to individual pages, Crazy Egg allowed us make improvements to the template. We saw that our footer was not being used, but the header was, so we moved the links from the footer to the header. On the Research Guides homepage, we saw that tags were not being used, so we removed them. We also noticed that the search box on the Research Guides interface might have been causing confusion because there is also a search box on the Research Guides interface, so we removed the search box from the header.
The Google Custom search engine was also very useful in helping us assess the ease of use of our website. When our website first launched, the most popular searches were for the LINKS Tutorial and Course Reserves. We realized that these links were hard to find, so we added additional links on our website to these pages. In the future, we plan to use the data from the search engine to help us create additional content. For example, we are going to look at what people are searching for from our citing sources page to help figure out what additional examples we should add. Or we might find that patrons are searching for information that is already on the page, which could help us rename or reposition existing links.
However, there are limitations to analytics. While the data can tell us that a search box is being used a lot, it cannot explain why someone is using it. For example, the full-text options box on the Research Guides was used a lot, but were people using it for the purpose it was intended or were they using it to try and start their research? Next fall, I would like to do usability testing to answer these types of questions that cannot be answered with analytics.
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