Stewart Library Instruction Team

Stewart Library Instruction Team

2000/2001 Annual Report

July 1, 2000 to May 15, 2001

Overview

Data

2001 Goals

Scholarship

Challenges

2002 Goals

Overview

The Stewart Library instruction team has had a very busy and productive year. Instruction has increased, serving over 800 more students than last year, even though we continue to be understaffed. We worked well together to accomplish many important team goals. As a team we communicated regularly and effectively with our major constituencies including students, faculty, the English Department and the FYE program. We continually improved and updated all of our curriculum in order to improve the information literacy competency of students and the broader WSU community.

Although all of our instruction sessions, materials and resources are regularly updated and assessed, a new more focused planning effort to identify and assess priority outcomes was begun in April and will continue into next year.

Individual instruction efforts of team members has also further supported the Weber State University library mission and the instruction program. Team members have been very involved in scholarship and professional development related to bibliographic instruction.

A great deal of time and effort has been put into the Information Literacy Competency requirement. This is the second year of the requirement at WSU and hundreds of students have now completed this requirement mostly through our classes, and to a much lesser extent through the exam. We have created new handouts and Web pages, provided training for academic advisors and staff. Although we have made some minor improvements to the exam, we feel the exam can be greatly improved and this is something Carol will work on at the ACRL Information Literacy Immersion program in New York in August. We have worked closely with the Telecommunications and Business Education Department and with WSU Academic Advising to clearly and regularly communicate with students about this new core requirement.

The instruction team met 9 times. Minutes of each team meeting are available on the team intranet. Members of the instruction team include Carol Hansen, Art Carpenter, Evan Christensen, Joan Hubbard, Wade Kotter, Ruby Licona, Jill Newby, Kathy Payne, Peggy Pierce, Lonna Rivera, Shaun Spiegel and Fran Zedney. Each team member is heartily congratulated for their active engagement in team activities and for all of their many accomplishments this year.

Instruction Data

The following table illustrates the data collected on instruction sessions provided:

Type of Instruction

1999/2000

2000/2001

+ or - sections or sessions

Faculty/Staff involvement this year

# sessions
or sections

# students

# sessions

# students

For credit

2201

108

244

Carol, Ruby, Wade, Art, Evan

2202

144

476

Carol, Art, Shaun

3340

-1

Jill

English 2010

1948

2129

Art, Evan, Wade,Fran, Shaun, Ruby, Carol, Lonna, Peggy

FYE

727

580

-9

Carol, Art, Evan, Wade, Shaun, Fran, Lonna, Peggy

Subject Specific

124

2529

160

2994

+36

Carol, Art, Evan, Fran, Kathy, Shaun, Wade, Jill

General & Untangling the Web sessions by Library Faculty/staff

403

229

Art, Evan, Carol, Wade, Jill, Kathy, Lonna, Shaun, Fran

Untangling the Web/ outside guests

-2

Other

498

534

-6

Total students served:

6455

7272

+822

Note: The number of instruction sessions offered for FYE and English 2010 depends on their course offerings. FYE offered fewer sections this year, and the English department offered more sections.

The data above is collected by Kathy Thiriot, Library Office Specialist, from the monthly instruction data forms submitted by instruction team members.

Information Literacy Competency Exam Data

The following table illustrates the data on exams:

	Registered for Exam	Passed on first try	Passed on 2nd or later try	Withdrew	Failed and did not retake	No Shows - Did not take exam
Fall 1999	14	14	0	0	0	0
Spring 2000	51	35	6	2	3	5
Summer 2000	37	20	5	0	0	12
Fall 2000	142	81	8	6	6	41
Spring 2001	177	83	50	3	11	30

This data is collected by Carole Lapine, Telecommunications and Business Education Department.

Instruction Team Goals

The team agreed on four goals for this academic year at our October 5, 2000 meeting. Listed below are these and other goals and a description of how each goal was met:

Goal 1) Obtain assessment data for 10% of all subject specific sessions in order to continually improve subject specific instruction

	The team created a new subject specific instruction evaluation form in November, 2000. This and an earlier form were used by most members of the instruction team to help evaluate their subject specific sessions.
	The intent was not to gather and analyze specific formal data, but to encourage each instructor to use the feedback to improve their sessions.
	Several team members have commented on the usefulness of this information for their continual improvement of these sessions

Goal 2) Develop a consistent format and design for our Web based Research Guides in order to better assist students with subject specific research

The team was interested in providing a more consistent look and feel for the research guides used to support subject specific instruction. We spent quite a bit of time coming to an agreement on the design. This was an invigorating process for some and frustrating for others. We had hoped for help from CATS, but we were disappointed with their design ideas and instead used a design format developed by Carol, Jill and Shaun with input from Fran, Lonna, Wade and other team members.

Team members continue to update Research Guides to the new format

	7 out of 21 Arts and Humanities guides have been updated (at least 12 more will be updated this summer)
	1 out of 1Applied Science and Technology guides have been updated
	27 out of 27 Business guides have been updated
	5 out of 5 Career Guidance guides have been updated
	2 out of 2 Education guides have been updated
	1 out of 1 Health Professions guides have been updated
	1 out of 1 Internet guide has been updated
	3 out of 3 Science guides have been updated
	12 out of 12 Social Sciences guides have been updated

The Government Documents pages have not yet been updated.

Although the new format is satisfactory for team, and team members have anecdotal support and positive comments from WSU faculty and students, additional assessment data will be gleaned from Web usability surveys, task observations and focus groups beginning summer 2000. This data will be used to further improve these guides.

Goal 3) Work with Alan Livingston on an automated classroom calendar in order to reduce the time it takes Fran to input classroom schedules/calendars on Web.

Alan was given a new position to oversee the redesign of the campus Web and did not work on this project as initially planned. Another WSU administrative department is beginning an RFP for a classroom scheduling software system and he will keep us informed if he feels we can benefit. We will continue to search for more efficient methods of using technologies for scheduling our facilities.

Goal 4) Participate in three instruction team training sessions in order to gain new skills and knowledge to support and enhance library instruction at WSU.

Most of the team participated in each of the following sessions:

	Digitization, Given by Kenning Arlitsch, Head of the University of Utah Marriott Library Digitization Center, March 22, 2001
	The End is the Beginning: Assessing Library Effectiveness, Given by Debra Gilchrist, sponsored by UALC, Utah State Library, Salt Lake City, March 8, 2001
	Instructional Video on the Web, Given by Nancy Lombardo, Eccles Health Sciences Library, University of Utah, February 13, 2001

In addition to those sessions mentioned above, team members attended the following instruction related continuing education activities off campus this year including:

	ALA in San Francisco (Jill, Shaun)
	World Ed Media 2001, Tampere, Finland (Carol)
	ACRL in Denver (Jill, Wade, Ruby)
	ACRL Preconference on online tutorials (Jill)
	ULA in Sandy (Shaun, Carol, Wade, Jill, Evan)
	ALA Midwinter in Washington DC (Jill)
	Eccles Health Sciences Fair, SLC (Jill)
	What is an Educated Person: Teaching with Technology, Regents Task Force, Provo (Carol)
	Effective Strategies for the Classroom: Active Learning, BYU (Carol)

In addition to the goals agreed upon by the team listed above, the team also accomplished the following goals throughout the past year.

Goal 5) Completely revise all instruction related policies, procedures, evaluation criteria and expectations.

The following documents were revised and updated this year:

	Library Instruction Services Policies and Procedures
	Instruction Faculty Performance Expectations
	(Faculty) Evaluation Criteria: Instruction Service
	Student end of course evaluation form
	Library Science course catalog descriptions

Goal 6) Update and revise instruction team Intranet in order to enhance communication among team members

The Instruction team intranet has been greatly expanded and enhanced, including minutes of all team meetings, a new team staffing plan, annual planning calendar, a revised data form and links to assessment resources among many other items and links.

Goal 7) Initiate an assessment planning process for Instruction program and team in order to improve instruction program.

	Although the team has been completing assessment activities in every area of instruction, the team began, at the very end of this year to develop more formal assessment plans using Debra Gilchrist's model and the WSU assessment model.
	The team agreed upon a new mission and statement of purpose for the Instruction Program

Goal 8) Work with the WSU History Department to remove LS2201 as a requirement and to initiate targeted subject specific instruction for History majors and minors.

History Department and Library Science faculty, after several meetings and discussions, have come to an agreement to drop the LS2201 requirement for History majors and minors. This makes much more sense to students with the new campus wide Computer and Information Literacy requirement. It will also enable Kathy Payne and John Sillitoe to begin offering enhanced subject specific instruction integrated into History 2000 course, beginning Fall semester 2001.

Goal 9) Completely revise and update the Internet Navigator 0nline course.

	This is Utah's first online course, and one of the State's only multi-institutional courses. The Internet Navigator is the most popular way for students to pass the WSU Information Literacy Competency requirement, and we teach hundreds of students each year. It is co-developed by UALC librarians and we benefit greatly from their input.
	This goal was completed primarily by Carol Hansen, and 3 librarians from the University of Utah, during Summer and Fall 2000, with important input also given by Art Carpenter and Shaun Spiegel. In Spring 2000 Shaun Spiegel joined Carol on the Internet Navigator maintenance team and Art has agreed to write a new draft of an important chapter on documenting and citing.
	Evaluations on the newly revised course were excellent. Over 87% of 158 students surveyed at the end of Spring Semester felt the overall course was "excellent" or "very good."

Scholarship

The instruction team was involved in the following scholarly activities relating to instruction:

Publications

	FORTHCOMING: Hansen, Carol, The Internet Navigator: An Online Course for Distance Learners, Library Trends, Summer 2001.
	FORTHCOMING: Hansen, Carol and Zublin, Catherine. Humanities on the Internet: A Collaborative Model for Faculty Development, World EdMedia 2001 Conference Proceedings,Tampere, Finland, 2001.
	Spiegel, S.R. (2001, May). Outdoor recreation: Sites to help you plan your summer vacation. College & Research Libraries News. (Also available online at http://www.ala.org/acrl/resmay01.html)
	SUBMITTED: Spiegel, Shaun R. and Sandra J. Weingart. Applying Minimalist Theory to Library Instruction. Submitted to Reference Services Review.

Presentations

	FORTHCOMING: Hansen, Carol and Lombardo, Nancy, Taming the Dragon: The Collaborative Revitalization of an Online Library Skills Course, presentation accepted for Mountain Plains Library Association and Arizona Library Association Joint Conference in Phoenix in December 2001.
	FORTHCOMING: Newby, Jill. Managing E-Resources, Medical Library Association, Orlando, Fl. May 25, 2001. (includes information on public service aspects, including instruction, web presentation and access)
	FORTHCOMING: Hansen, Carol and Catherine Zublin, Humanities on the Internet: A Collaborative Model for Faculty Development, World EdMedia 2001,Tampere, Finland. June 28, 2001.
	Hansen, Carol (co presenter) Utah Library Association, Sandy, Utah, The New Internet Navigator: Results of a Statewide Initiative, Co-presenter, May 4, 2001

Grants

Carol Hansen, Library, and Catherine Zublin, Collaborative Model for Faculty Development: Presentation at the Ed-Media 2001 World Conference on Educational Media, Hypermedia and Telecommunications. WSU Hemingway Faculty Vitality Grant, WSU Research, Scholarship and Professional Growth Committee, March 2001, $3400 funded.

Spiegel, Shaun. RSPG Grant to complete a Library Web Usability Study, Fall 2000.

Although unfunded this grant proposal has served a very significant role in educating library faculty and staff about Web usability. This proposal is the major impetus behind current efforts to complete a library Web usability study. Ideas and methodologies presented in this grant have already helped to improve instruction Web pages.

Challenges

A major challenge for several members of the team has been the changing level of support for Web enhanced classes. Several team members worked with Alan Livingston, up to late Fall 2000 and really liked the courses.weber.edu programs he had implemented, especially the grade book and student end of course evaluation we could use in our electronic classroom. Unfortunately he was removed from this project to undertake the revitalization of the campus Web. Instead of keeping his programming the WSUOnline team decided to start from scratch and we lost access to programs that had worked well for us in the past. They felt they had other priorities and our needs are still not being met. A useable grade book integrating rolls for our cross listed courses has not been made available, nor was the Web delivered end of course evaluation. We were required to rewrite syllabi, policies and procedures which was needlessly time consuming and risked confusing faculty and students.

Another major challenge has been our understaffing of faculty involved in instruction activities. As a team, we were lacking two faculty positions during Summer and Fall, and still lacking one position this Spring. The addition of more faculty will definitely help our overall staffing plan. Additional faculty will enable a more efficient use of human resources in the library and help us provide more and better instruction for students.

Instruction team members are expected to make for credit course materials available to students on the Web. Art, Jill, Wade, Shaun, and Carol have done so. Evan and Ruby are working on getting their materials on the Web this summer.

The library instruction team could greatly benefit from more programming assistance. We would not have to wait for the WSUOnline team to do the things we need and we could incorporate many needed improvements into our Web resources and course materials. Hopefully the 1/2 time Web development position we are hiring will be able to meet some of the programming needs of the instruction team.

Team Goals for 2001/2002

At the April 26, 2001 team meeting the team decided on the following goals for the next academic year:

Sustaining Outcome (ongoing goals)

Goal 1) Provide a comprehensive instruction program for WSU students including, for credit, online and on demand instruction in order to graduate students with information literacy competencies

We will know if we have done this as we gather and use assessment data in order to continually improve student learning, teaching and the instruction program. We will communicate our efforts in an annual report to the University Librarian

Strategic Outcomes (immediate and shorter range goals)

Goal 2) Develop an assessment plan for each type of instruction in order to improve instruction.

Assessment data collected will be used to continually improve instruction. These plans will be made available on the team intranet.

Goal 2) Assist with hiring new faculty and professional staff in order to to increase numbers of faculty involved in
instruction team activities

It is hoped that by reducing involvement in Eng2010 and FYE's faculty would have more time for subject specific sessions. Instruction session statistics will provide needed data.

(Note: These goals were updated and expanded in September 2001.

This Annual report was last updated on 01/31/2004 . Please send comments to Carol Hansen, Professor and Instruction Services Librarian