March 9, 2015 Meeting of User Education Committee

Agenda not yet available.

Members Present: Sarah Christensen (ex officio), Jemma Ku (ex officio), Jameatris Rimkus (15), Janelle Sander (16), Elizabeth Sheehan (15), Mark Wardecker (16), Sandra Wolf (16), Harriet Green (16), Lisa Hinchliffe (ex officio) – Chair, Susan Avery (ex officio)

Members Absent: Michelle Dewy (16), Scott Schwartz (15), Mark Wardecker (16)

Additional Attendees: Crystal Sheu, Kirsten Feist, Chris Prom, Jen-Chien Yu, Sarah Crissinger (Information Literacy GA)

1. Welcome and Introduction

Everyone introduced themselves to Chris and Jen.

2. Agenda Review

No additions were made to the agenda.

3. Acclamations & Accolades

Lisa was awarded the 2015 ACRL/IS Miriam Dudley Instruction Librarian Award last month. Lisa mentioned that she was honored and excited about being recognized. The award was created to honor librarians who have made especially significant contributions to the advancement of instruction in research libraries.

4. Library Assessment Projects—Jen-chien Yu (Guest)

Jen talked to the committee about both room usage assessment and the committee’s assessment needs in relation to instruction. Jen has been helping Jeff and IT assess the use of many meeting rooms within the library, as these rooms often take a lot of money and effort to keep up-to-date. Most of this work has been done through analyzing the outlook reservation system. Jen can provide this data to anyone that is interested.

Jen is now working on assessing computer labs and instructional rooms. This assessment must go beyond the key check out statistics because a variety of people use these facilities. Jeff is most interested in learning about lighting, furniture, acoustic, temperature, and if there is a need for more rooms. A solution Jen is currently using is to pilot three boxes that have surveys and room for responses on how the room is working for instructors. The questions on the surveys have been tested with IT and facilities.

Some committee members voiced their concerns about who has the time to fill out these surveys. Instructors can’t possibly have times to ask students to do so, as they are often focusing on assessing their learning. Susan suggested that holding focus groups with people that regularly teach in 291, 314, etc. might be more valuable. These focus groups should be held in the room that you’re talking about so that the session can jog your memory and you can demo the issues you’re discussing. It might also motivate people to fill out the form by providing details in Library Office notes about what happened because you filled out prior forms. Making the form electronic might facilitate participation.

Jen mentioned that she is happy to work on assessments about LibGuide effectiveness, visualizing and analyzing data in the instructional statistic database, and assessing the use of the new ACRL Il Revisions.

5. Library Gateway- Chris Prom (Visitor)

Chris mentioned that the gateway team currently is not working on a lot of changes and is instead focusing time on CMS implementation with WordPress. He asked the committee if they had any concerns.

Susan mentioned that she needs to be able to access URLs for pop-up windows for maps of instructional facilities like ACES. The share feature needs to include a link. Chris will look into that.

Chris explained that one of the big next steps is to work through second-level pages that are instructional in nature. He sees this group as being a part of that process. Second-level pages are any pages not at the unit level. They have content that is managed centrally. Some examples include RIS, LEARN, intranet, and Online Journal databases pages.

This process would include 1) identifying second-level pages and asking Jen for usage statistics to get information on their use and what would be best and 2) evaluation that might include three categorizations: current and valuable, out of date and valuable, and out of date and not valuable. We must stop duplicating web content. Chris reiterated that we want the leanest possible footprint but we should also meet the needs of multiple learning communities and have a good flow through the site.

LibGuides 2.0 creates other issues this group might eventually help with. Styling requirements and CMS connections are a few things to think about. Chris also asked if there were any additional functionalities that would support instruction, including plugins offered through WordPress. These are preemptive possibilities and once Chris has a better idea of needs he might give the committee options and ask again.

Two tasks that the committee feels are important for the web development team to work on are 1) creating a set of assets (each database) that you can populate into a page without having to go through SFX and 2) a database of librarians and their subject specialties. An Intranet for sharing learning objects, assessment tools, and committee documents would be helpful.

6. OER LibGuide (http://guides.library.illinois.edu/oer)

Sarah mentioned that there will be two OER events this week to celebrate Open Education week. She also shared the link to the guide for further feedback from committee members.

7. Strategic Planning- Spring Open Forum on Online Teaching/ Learning

This will be discussed more next session as the meeting went over time.

Respectfully submitted,

Sarah Crissinger