Flametoad

We Don’t Make the Rules: Developing User-centered Tutorial for First Year Students

Academic integrity – Miami University committee came up with a report w/12 recommendations. It was determined that there needed to be instruction in incoming freshmen, but there was no time in the student schedule to add yet another course just for AI. So they decided to create an online course.

For this online course, everything was created by librarians—content, design, layout!

They decided not to use Blackboard because they didn’t like the built in quiz function or the navigation within Bloackboard.

Quiz was based on learning objectives from each section. Questions were randomized from a pool.

Goals

1 to 2 hours of readings and exercise, which would establish a common foundation for instructors to build upon. However, it was short enough that it would not “take away” from their other studies.

Used an interactive media class capstone course (4 SCH) to use students to evaluate the learning module. They developed a list of best practice, critiqued similar websites, evaluated the prototype, etc. The downside is that they had limited usability training, they had trouble communicating with a busy liaison, and the librarians had to assimilate input from multiple student teams.

It’s not yet mandatory. 2 divisions (colleges?) are encouraging their students to use it. Other classes are switching from another university’s tutorial to Miami University’s own. Preston’s take: This is still a "beta" project. Without buy-in from leadership and faculty, it’ll wither on the vine. It needs hard data on learning outcomes to sell it within the academic community.

Challenges:

• Resistance to anything mandatory
• Buy-in from all segments of community
• Overlap with other tutorials- one other college is requiring a college-specific tutorial that overlaps with the more general tutorial.

Questions:

• Did the librarians know the scripting languages/course design/etc before they started the project? Mostly, yes. There was some on-the-job learning. It sounds like their librarians get a lot of training in Ed-tech. LOTS of web design, online learning theory, etc.
  
• Integrity of the quiz was important to them. They were very concerned about students cheating on the academic integrity quiz! What were students cheating on? It was a Human Subject Testing quiz for faculty. It could take faculty hours to complete, but it was recognized that even faculty were using an answer key to get through the quiz so they wouldn’t kill a whole day going through the module.
• Resistance coming from leadership? Provost supports it, deans and faculty are still skeptical. There is still a lot of resistance to online learning at MU.
• How are you getting the word out? Linked from website, news items from supporting colleges.

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