Embedded Librarian Challenge Two: Librarians' Role in the Course Syllabus

I do believe to be successful in any project, the goal or objectives have to be defined and made clear the same as you plan to drive long distance. You have to know what your destination is. So does the Embedded Librarian Pilot Project. A written proposal is not enough, librarians' specific roles have to be reflected or described in the course syllabus. After some looking and asking around, I was not able to find what I needed. Most embedded librarians were listed either as co-instructors or research assistants with contact information in the course syllabi without detailing their roles. I turned to Mr. David Shumaker for help. His pointer was very helpful:

"The course-embedded librarian can take many different roles, such as presenting in-class information literacy instruction, meeting with students individually or in teams to counsel them on research projects, collaborating with the instructor to specify assignments, grading assignments, posting help and comments to the course website, etc.  So the first task is to define your role in consultation with the instructor. Then you will know how to describe your role in the syllabus."

After discussing with the course instructor and program coordinator, embedded librarian services were officially included in the course syllabus:

"The embedded librarian works with the course faculty to achieve the goal of improving each student’s scholarly writing, library, and research skills by providing the following services: 

• Assisting with and providing training on locating, retrieving, and evaluating information for course assignments and/or research projects.
• Providing help with using information management tools such as EndNote for course assignments and to organize references.
• Answering questions posted on course discussion board, Embedded Librarian FAQ.
• Linking library resources to the course by creating a course research guide using LibGuides.
• Maintaining the course blog related to writing and research such as Tip of the Week related to library research."

As the course progresses, am I doing what were expected in the syllabus? More challenges are on the way...

Last Presentation of the Year

Yesterday I gave a presentation on literature searching to 75 DNP and PhD nursing students. The course director sent me a nice email afterwards:

"Thank you for the excellent presentation you gave to the DNP and PhD students this afternoon! The content of your presentation and the pdf file you have shared will be useful to the students and me as course director. The faculty who are assisting with the course and I can readily refer students to the pdf file to reinforce the information you shared today."

Looking back, I really had a good year with my liaison services to the College of Nursing. The more I actively engaged myself with them,  the more return requests I received. A good busy year! 

Snow=Good harvest

Doodle -- Online Signup Sheet

In the past three years, I was co-teaching with our nursing faculty on a 2-credit course--Informatics for Healthcare. We had over 60 students each year and we required them to work on Never Event group project. Each group had three students. We had used Wikispaces, Google sites, and our campus wiki for students to sign up for their topics and wiki served as group project site for online collaboration.

Now here comes this year. This course has a new instructor and we decided not to use wiki as online collaboration tool. When it came to have more than 60 students sign up for their never event topics and areas, what tool can we use except using a traditional paper signup sheet? With this question in mind, I tried Google forms and couldn't make them to work for our purpose. One of my friend suggested trying Doodle, which is known for scheduling events. I hadn't seen people use it for signing up for tasks, at least not among my colleagues and peers. Wow, it only took three steps to create a poll: name your poll, enter choices, set up settings, and done. Then Doodle generated an URL to be sent to participants. From the participants' site, it is even simple: click the poll URL, enter their names, make selections, and save.

Good things about Doodle:

• Create as many options as you wish
• Control how many choices one participant can make
• Make participants' choices visible or invisible to them
• Control who has permission to edit choices or results
• No signup is needed to participate in the poll
• Form display layout in mobile devices looks great
• Explore results to an Excel spreadsheet
• Free

Not so good things about Doodle:

• Can't type a long sentence into an option box, which means you will have to use key words to describe your choices.
• There is no way to create a multiple choice form. For example, if you have a topic, you need to have more than one students to sign up for that topic, you will have to repeat the topic with choices such as this.
• The horizontal layout of the form on the Web is difficult to navigate especially when you have a lot of choices.

In general, Doodle making choices feature serves the purpose of signing up group work quite well. Unfortunately, it didn't get used for this course. The primary instructor decided to stick to a paper signup form. I totally understand a paper form is always the safer and traditional method and most people feel comfortable with.

This got me to think that adopting technology in teaching and learning takes effort and risk. Not everyone is willing to take the risk and go beyond their comfort zone. I also think there might be even better tools out there for signing up group work. Send me the link if you know of any.

The Joy of Collaboration, Teaching, and Learning

As a health sciences librarian, I consider myself pretty lucky to be given the chance to co-teach with Dr. Cynthia Russell in a 2 credit course: NSG505 Informatics for Healthcare since 2006. In the previous two years, part of the class that I was involved in was assisting students researching and searching for information on WebQuest clinical topics. As for 2008 class, we challenged the students to research on the current hot topics in healthcare: never events. The assignment was the development of a comprehensive wiki page focused on a specific never event or never events in general (25% of course grade) of their choice. More than 70 students signed up for 28 never event topics with three in a group each researching on background information about a never event, the effects of a never event from different perspectives (e.g., family, healthcare professionals, healthcare facilities, and insurers), and other arguments or supportive strategies a never event should or should not be on the list. The challenge for students came from two aspects: searching for relevant and quality information to answer questions, and synthesizing and conveying the information onto a wiki page. This offers a great opportunity for students to demonstrate how well their information technology (IT) competencies and information literacy (IL) competencies were as most of them belong to Generation Y. As they think they are computer savvy, when it comes to research and professional activities, are they as good as they claim to be?

During the course students looked for information and worked on their wiki pages, I was swamped, crazy, but happy to help them. Especially the few days before the due date, I received more than 90 email requests, provided more than 20 one-on-one consultations, and got more than 20 SMS messages. In addition, I delivered mini-talks before each face-to-face class on library skills and tips on searching for information using library resources and online resources. The assignment itself was also a challenge to the instructors. We designed just-in-time guides, tutorials, and handouts put on the course wiki page and Blackboard to help students with searching and finding related information. We also brought in a nursing PhD student to assist students in locating information for their assignments. The nursing faculty, the health sciences librarian, and the nursing PhD student have only one goal in mind: help students to achieve success.

I was inspired and impressed as the course moved forward, especially the two learning just-in- time modules developed by Dr. Russell: Searching for Web Resources and Distinguishing Types of Literature. When librarians develop online tutorials or subject guides, they always ask themselves what their patrons need. Few has the answer and just do it out of their own creativity and assumptions. I think these two narrated slide presentations give librarians some ideas on what the students need and what the teaching faculty expect of librarians.

What I have learned from the teaching faculty included innovative ways in using technology to deliver teaching content; creative teaching methods to engage students in learning and critical thinking; and enthusiasm in guiding and helping students. Seeing students grow I feel myself grow, too.