Info skills @ UELCathy Walsh

Ella Mitchell

26th July 2011

At UEL

• ‘Get that Job’ tool• Open access• Professional looking• Highly accessible for students• Established brand

Why we needed a new resource

• What we had was good but difficult to find• We wanted a refresher for students• A resource to suit different learning needs of

our students and students that are not always on campus

• Available 24/7 to match many of our services and to meet students’ expectations

• A resource that was not too dictatorial: to suit our ‘strategic learners’

Why this approach?

• Focus on level one learners due to cost and time restrictions

• Information skills and academic integrity the priority

• Making information skills relevant to the student / assignment-focussed

• Students sometimes respond better to their fellow students

• Professional-looking resource

Creative commons

• This is an Open Access Educational Resource.

• Open Educational Resources tend be more geared towards reusable objects….

• Videos on Youtube: can link to, embed etc. • PDFs downloadable • It is openly available on the internet.

Other benefits?

• Open access enables collaborative partners and pre entry students to use the resource

• Contributes to the transition to UK HE for international students as well as home students

• Preparation for the expectations of HE learning

• Addressing the expectations ‘gap’ for academic staff

What we had already

• UEL Library webpages• Information on the VLE• A lot of great information….. gently hidden! • Not a very clear layout• Site reliant on having had some guidance

in how to use it

What we liked out there

• Staffordshire Assignment Survival Kit• Cardiff Information Literacy Resource Bank• Leeds Skills@Library• OU Safari

There are many other examples of good practice in this area.

What we produced

How we did it• Getting funding• Setting up project team• Consultations• High level design• Content map• Prototype• Detailed design • Content collection from SMEs• Intensive development

– web design – video production – guides – demonstrations – quizzes - writing pages

• Uploading content• Summative evaluations• Final version and launch• Copyright• Marketing

Feedback

www.uel.ac.uk/infoskills

• We are always happy to hear your feedback about the site:

• Would you use it? How? Who with? • How might your students use it?

What do you think?

• “Found Info skills very useful – great idea to put it all together” D. Patel

UEL student • “I have had another look at your Info skills pages and they are very

impressive” K. Virdee, Academic Liaison Librarian

• “p.s. I only discovered the eBook thanks to the InfoSkills website - very useful!” An e-mail from a student support officer, at one of our collaborative partnership institutions.

• ‘UEL’s new information literacy site looks good. Does what it says on the tin.’ Tweet

• Library staff have already started using the site and there has been some good feedback from students in information skills sessions.

• Web statistics since 1st March: – 1800 visits (550 returning)– Average 4.5 page views in 3.5 minutes– Referencing and Video Library are top entry points after Home Page

Looking to the future:

• Planned launch for Semester A 2011/12• Looking into the use of the site on mobile

devices e.g. the quizzes are not compatible with Iphones

• Develop more multimedia content• Conduct further evaluation • Expand the resource into wider academic

skills

Info skills @ UELThank you!