Info skills: How it came to be

Erica Plowman

Learning Designer

UELconnect

Friday 13th January 2012

WWW.UEL.AC.UK/INFOSKILLS

Info skills is designed to support Level 1 students to develop the key skills they need to find information for their assignments and use it appropriately.

It was created in partnership between members of UEL’s Library and Learning Services and the Distance and E-learning team (UELconnect)

Questions we’ve been asked

How did you pull everything together?

How did you make it look so good?

Where did all the materials come from?

Why make it ‘open-access’?

Why not include other study skills?

Who did it?

Why does it TAKE SO LONG? (OFTEN ASKED BY MANAGERS)

One way to describe how we did it

Analysis

Specification

Design and Development

Content

WritingCoding

Testing

Promotion

Maintenance and update

A typical ‘development’

cycle

But this description ..

• Appears too mechanistic to include creativity and spontaneity.

• Doesn’t capture the relationships, empathy and communication at the heart of the process.

• Is often retrofitted onto the messier way things really happen!

Maybe it’s more helpful ..

To talk about how things develop rather than how they ‘are developed’

Which reminds me of ..

‘Evolution’

So let’s talk about Info skills in terms of:• Species: What kind of creature is it?• Origins: Where did it come from?• Evolutionary process: How was it created?• New forms: What next?

SPECIES

What kind of learning tool is it?

What context and audience is it intended for?

What is the underlying design and thinking behind it?

How does this meet the needs identified?

Photo used under Creative Commons from Peter Harris

Species

• Static content – complementing F2F sessions, helpdesk/email support, specialist Subject Librarian appts and online chat tool

• Independent/self-directed use – ‘designed’ content, explicit, consistent, cross-referenced

• Informal learning – learner free to browse around, must attract them, not compulsory

• Hybrid resource – reference, information and learning material• Multimedia – information presented in different formats• ‘Just-in-time’ or ‘strategic’ – to allow learners to use it in different ways,

last minute help, answer a specific question, refresh knowledge or broader overview of new concepts

• Open access – easiest access and widest reach for all learners (distance, part-time, international, pre-entry, partner colleges) also advertises support we offer to potential new students

Genetic (design) blueprint• Transparent navigation, flexible entry points – supports different points of

need (starting off / refresher / lastminute.com), maximise learner control• Browsable, bite-size resources, variety of formats – flexible paths through

content, caters to different learner preferences (eg straight to a practice quiz, or follow step-by-step guide), engage learners with multimedia

• Conversational, motivational narratives – address learner directly, encourage independent learners to engage with the material

• Tutor and peer support built-in – videos reflect genuine student experience and make it more relevant for them, supportive advice for new students in particular

• Assignment context – emphasis on‘why’ you need these skills not just ‘what’ they are, home page slideshow sets the scene

• High quality graphic design/images – to engage and attract learners• Usability and accessibility – video subtitles and transcripts, not too text-

heavy, only 3 levels of navigation, does contain Flash objects however.

ORIGINS

Where did it come from?

What existing materials did we start with?

What pre-cursors were there?

Photo used under Creative Commons from APS Museum

Origins – our main starting points

• Existing materials – handouts, leaflets from Library, help docs on website, librarians support material

• External websites and OERs – lots of inspiration from other universities

• ‘Get that job’ – we had created an in-house resource with Employability colleagues to support students with skills needed to apply for jobs. It looked like this …

The original ‘Get that job’

Origins

Also:

New Employability brand

At the same time we started planning Info skills, our Employability and Enterprise team wanted to update ‘Get that job’ to match the new brand of printed materials they had commissioned from Wire Design.

EVOLUTION

How was it created?

Who contributed to its creation and what did they do?

What were the key things that made it happen?

Photo used under Creative Commons from Mary Margret

The process of evolutionIn very basic terms, the theory of evolution goes something like:• Existing forms come under pressure from changes in

the environmentnew conditions, lack of resources

• There is a degree of variety in gene poolspontaneous mutations, newcomers to the population

• Genes mix through cross-fertilisation, producing slightly different forms

natural selection favours the better adapted forms

• Over long periods, this should produce new forms that are more successful

Info skills evolution

Let’s consider each aspect in terms of this project:

• Existing forms• Changes in the environment

new conditions, lack of resources

• Variety in gene poolspontaneous mutations, newcomers to the population

• Cross-fertilisation natural selection, better adapted

• New forms

Existing forms gave us ideas:

As mentioned in Origins, some of them were:• UEL Library website guidance docs• Librarians’ VLE material• OER and external websites

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

• Original ‘Get that job’ design• New employability brand

Changes in the environment

New conditions: Widening participation, more students with info skills gaps Student expectations - access to 24/7 info/help Expectation that online tools for learning as media rich and easy-to-use

as wider internet (Youtube, Google, Amazon etc) Information (overload) age – the need to find information. NOW!

Lack of resources: Demands on teaching and support staff for F2F and 1:1 support Doing ‘more for less’ agenda – maybe needs to be interpreted as

‘more of some things and less of others’ High quality online resources may need a greater investment ‘up front’

but if they meet important needs, reach all students, and have a good shelf life, they may be more value-added than doing other cheaper, quicker things. Needs thinking about.

Variety in gene poolDiversity of ideas, experiences, expertise, roles, responsibilities:

Project team: Head of Library and Learning Services, Academic Services Manager,Subject Librarian, Learning Designer, Learning Technology Adviser, Learning Materials Developer

Subject Matter Experts: Subject Librarians provided ideas advice, content and volunteered for videos*. Wider Library staff took part in testing.

Specialist input: from Academic Integrity and Psychology (APA referencing), Skills Modules Leaders also appeared in videos*

Student Voice: volunteers for focus groups, videos and testing, Student Liaison Officers provided useful perspective

‘Newcomers’ to the populationExternal web developersA professional cameraman helped us improve quality of in-house videosColleagues and students helped with photos*Cardiff Information Literacy Resource Bank – permission to re-purpose 3 quizzes

‘Spontaneous mutations’ – things we didn’t know about when we startedEmployability brandingCMS tool

* Get full written consent for use of anyone’s image

Cross-fertilisation/Natural selection

Continuous collaboration and consultation within our project team, taking ideas back and forth between Subject Librarians, web developers and others.

Processes:

Inputs:• Initial focus groups with students and Subject Librarians• Requirements discussions with project team, consulting benchmarks

Output: Project outline documentation, planned structure and milestone plan• Review of internal and external online and print material• Subject Librarians completed content ‘proformas’ on key areas

Output: Prototyped ‘proof of concept’ design with small group staff and students

Inputs:

Prototype feedback, specialist consultations, iterations of draft text followed up with individuals, filming and editing videos, sourcing photos, creating images, screencaptures, pdfs, quizzes, iterations of web design and functionality

Output: Finished resources and a CMS tool allowing us to build 80% of the site for a wider evaluation

Inputs:

Feedback collated, amends agreed, text edited and proofread, resources completed, tagging and debugging. Publicity material and campaign planned. Google analytics set up. FAQ, Glossary, help info compiled.

Output: Info skills completed and launched after final review by Library colleagues in March 2011

The Appendix of examples illustrates some of these developments

Adaptation

• Collaboration and testing of ideas makes it more likely the final result will be ‘well-adapted’ to your population and your conditions.

• I prefer ‘well-adapted’ as it sounds like a higher expectation and less clinical than ‘fit for purpose’.

• The end result is achieved through a balance of decisions based on discussion, evaluation, feedback and testing, and sometimes compromises with the technology.

• It happens over iterative cycles: formal ones with set evaluation points and continuous informal, small-scale ones.

• It’s an ongoing process – LLS have just completed a 6-month evaluation and are planning further updates to Info skills.

New Forms

We are now developing a new resource to support academic writing skills at Level 1.

Planned changes are:• improved access via mobile

devices• more practice exercises• the option of sequences of

linked guidance and practice resources

And probably others we don’t know about yet

Lessons learned from nature?• Organic process

not quite as slow as evolution Info skills took about 6 months actual development you do need a clear milestone plan but it has to allow for some spontaneity and trying out new ideas without this our final look and feel and the flexible CMS tool would not have happened

• Collaborate to create diversity of experience/expertise from different disciplines – about 35 people probably contributed to

this project in total collaboration can be slow but often produces the best ideas and helps solve problems think of it as having access to a wider talent pool

• Build in opportunities for growth think about how to allow easy updating/adding of new resources (and who by!) is there room to expand on the structure you’ve designed? this is true for a resource library, VLE site or other type of online tool

• Testing and evaluation more likely the final result will be well-adapted keeps it learner-centred happening all the time not just at the end

As shown by this view of the development process…

ADDIE: Less like this …

Analyse

Design

DevelopImplement

Evaluate

Analyse

Design

Develop

Implement

And more like this

Appendix of examples

Site structure version 1 Site structure version 8!

Requirements discussions

Focus group - students

Focus group - staff

Content proformas

Give a structure, useful to ask experts to identify their key messages

Content proformas

But let people do it as they prefer, it’s getting the raw content that counts, not fitting pre-determined structures. They always change anyway.

Final Guides templates

Prototype feedback – students

Prototype feedback - staff

The CMS toolIn the process of meetings with Wire Design… we discovered that as well as doing the visual

design for the new resources, they could also give us a simple-t-use CMS tool which would actually allow us to build the site flexibly ourselves.

We worked in partnership with them … to agree the design and functionality of the system

and were then able to upload the content and resources we’d prepared very easily.

This made everything much more flexible … as we could edit and refine the content as much

as necessary during development and meant the sites would be easy and cheap to expand and update in the future.

Anyone could use it … But we have trained 2 individuals who take

responsibility for it to streamline updates

For example ► This is where you would add a new page or a sub-

page to the Referencing Section.

CMS: Front and backThe Harvard Referencing page on the site

The Harvard Referencing page in the CMS

EG Promotion

Info skills: Not the end

Erica Plowman

e.plowman@uel.ac.uk