Exploring the impact of an embedded approach to Information Skills teaching

 Information skills teaching is a core element of the service that the Library offers to students and, occasionally, staff at the university. In the past, these sessions were often known simply as “the Library session” or something similar when discussing this support with academic staff. As a result, there has often been misunderstandings and a lack of clarity about what these sessions covered and what students would learn should they choose to attend. Another important characteristic of these sessions was that they were often standalone, relatively generic sessions and even if they were, theoretically, linked to a module, they rarely made any reference to the assignments that the students would undertake on that module so, arguably, were having a limited impact on the overall performance of students taking those modules.

Over the last few years, the picture has changed, increasingly, these teaching sessions are embedded within modules and overall degree programmes. The content taught relates directly to the assessments the students will complete and students are not only developing generic research skills but gaining a greater understanding of the importance of these skills to ensure they complete their assessments to the best of their ability. These changes have often been driven by greater opportunities to discuss where Information Literacy (IL) or Information Skills teaching can be embedded into academic programmes with module leaders, but also wider programme teams as well.

At York, the Academic Liaison Team has recognised that a more embedded approach was desirable but no research had been done by the team to measure the effectiveness of this approach and the impact that this approach actually has on students and academic staff. In 2019/20 I undertook research to measure the impact of embedded teaching on students in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science. The Library delivers IL teaching that is embedded on two core modules in stage 1 and stage 2 of the Linguistics UG programme. Throughout the course of this research, 8 students and the 2 module leaders were interviewed. 

The research demonstrated that a more embedded approach had a positive impact on engagement with the IL teaching in a number of ways. Students noted that the sessions being clearly linked to their assessments ensured that they engaged in a way that they would have been unlikely to had the sessions just been generic sessions that were not timetabled in their regular weekly lecture slot (stage 1) or strongly urged to attend by their module leader who also attended (stage 2). 

In both modules, the module leader was present for the teaching sessions and actively engaged with the session as well. The students felt this was useful but not essential to the success of the teaching. However, both the students and the module leaders acknowledged the value of the module leader being present so that they were aware of the content that had been discussed and could add additional context about their module during the session which helped the students to fully appreciate the importance of what they were learning in the session and how they could apply it to their assessments.

In addition to ensuring that the students will improve their literature searching skills as a result of attending these sessions, it is also hoped that students will increase their knowledge and understanding of the resources available and recognise why they might use one resource over another. As part of the research, students were surveyed before they attended the teaching session and then again after the session so that their answers could be compared to try and measure the impact of the session on student knowledge and understanding of literature searching techniques and the resources available. In the stage 2 students especially, students demonstrated much more awareness of the LLBA database following the session. It was also clear that students had developed a good understanding of the key concepts discussed in both sessions relating to literature searching principles and also evaluation of sources.

Students often overestimate their own IL competency so it was unsurprising that very few students admitted to a lack of confidence in their IL ahead of the sessions but their was a noticeable shift in confidence following the sessions which was one of the most satisfactory findings as a key aim of delivering the teaching is so that students will have the confidence to find high quality sources quickly and efficiently.

It became apparent in the interviews that many students do not have a great deal of awareness of the existence of an Academic Liaison Librarian for their department, and even if they are aware of that, they are even less likely to realise that the Librarian can offer them any additional support and what support might look like. This was also seen in the survey where ahead of the teaching sessions around 80% of respondents indicated if they couldn’t find the information they need, they would either search online, ask the module convenor or a friend for help with only a handful of respondents indicating they would ask a Librarian. Following the teaching sessions, this had dropped to just over  20%. 

In conclusion, this research has offered a really useful insight into the perspectives of both students and staff on the impact that embedding IL teaching into a module and overall academic programme can have. It also demonstrated the importance of taking this approach to ensuring that students engage as much as possible with this teaching as it is critical that students develop these skills, not just to be successful in their degree programme, but also to enhance their future employability. It is hoped that the opportunity will arise to do further research in other faculties as well in order to measure whether students have similar perspectives on other programmes. If you would like to discuss the findings from this research further please contact Tony Wilson (tony.wilson@york.ac.uk) . 

Step by step: making videos with Videoscribe

By Ned Potter, Academic Liaison 

In September I made a new video to introduce the Library in 60 seconds. It was designed to be played in short Induction talks, and to be embedded in various online guides. The whole thing took around 4 hours to do (albeit spread across a couple of days) and it turned out pretty well - before we go through the step-by-step process here's the video:


It was made using Videoscribe, and they just published their 'Favorite VideoScribe videos of 2019' which, it turns out not only has videos from the BBC but also from our Library! The video above being featured on their list has reminded me to complete this blog post, which has been in the Lib-Innovation drafts folder for a while...

Step 1: Script-writing 

Because we were also producing a longer virtual tour, I knew from the start this would be only one minute long. This was surprisingly non-limiting in the end: once you accept you can't go into detail on anything, it becomes quite easy to write a friendly voice-over that introduces a number of key points in quick succession. The purpose of the video was to provide an overview, help students understand the basics, and encourage them to ask for help. So a brief script was worked up with that in mind, and I shared it with a colleague for a second opinion, then with the narrators. 

I wanted Yorkshire voices for this introduction to a Yorkshire library, and I wanted people who were friendly and informal, and I wanted it to be a man and a women ideally. Happily my first choice voice-over artists (Sarah Peace from IT and Martin Philip from Academic Liaison) said yes when I asked them to do it! 

Step 2: Voice-over recording 

The hardest thing about recording narration is finding a suitable acoustic in which to record. Even small meeting rooms in our building seem to be echoey, and although the Linguistics Department does have an audio booth we can get access to, it wasn't available in our time frame. In the end we chose quite a big room that has enough in it to absorb any resonance, leaving us with an acceptable sound quality. 

I recorded my narrators on my own laptop using Audacity, a freely available audio-editing tool, and an entry-level Blue Snowball mic I use for webinars. It took 40 minutes to record both this script and the Virtual Tour script, and the main issue was making sure the narrators were close enough to the mic. 

Audacity is incredibly simple to use. You can zoom right in on the visual representation of the audio-waves and easily identify what talking and what is not - for example, in-breaths before a word. Breaths and pauses can be selected, highlighted, and deleted. For this reason, there was absolutely no need to aim for a perfect take of the narration. Each narrator took their time delivering their section, re-running any sentence they weren't happy with. It then took me perhaps 20 minutes to edit the audio into one seamless narration, and export it as an MP3 file to add to the video.

The audio for the voice-over, as displayed by Audacity

Step 3: Creating the video with Videoscribe 

The process of creating a video with this software is to add objects to the canvas (a little bit like you might with Prezi) and then decide how they are animated, and when. So for example you can just type text in and have a hand or pen 'write' the text at the speed of your choosing, or you can add photographs which can either be 'drawn' or pushed into frame by a hand, or just appear. You put all this together, add music and a voice over you if you wish, and you have a video.

I've tended to always build towards a final picture that includes everything the viewer has just seen - so you see each section as it's added, and then at the end you zoom out to see everything at once. But you don't have to use this approach - you can stay buried in the detail if that helps you tell your story.

The VideoScribe interface looks like this:

The main part of the screen displays everything that will appear in the video, but the boxes along the bottom are how you dictate when objects arrive, how they enter the video, and in which order.

Here's a closer shot of that:

All those icons - the phone, the thumbs up, the wifi symbol etc - are from VideoScribe itself. There's also some writing, and (in the middle) a screengrab of the library catalogue.

Absolutely key to a good VideoScribe video, in my experience, is the 'Set Camera to Current Position' button I've highlighted here:

This allows you to control what the camera sees, meaning you can have multiple objects in the frame at once. For example at the end of the video there's a big smiley face and the #UoYTips text added: by default the camera would zoom in so these filled the frame, meaning you could only really see them. But by setting the camera to the same position for the last three sections of the video, you get to see the entire library map, AND the smiley face / #UoYTips in the same shot.

The whole process of creating the video took around 2 hours: trust me, this is REALLY quick for making video content!

Step 4: Exporting to YouTube 

I exported two versions of the video: one directly to YouTube, and one as an MP4 file to embed directly into the Induction PowerPoint presentation me and my colleagues would be using throughout the first week of term. 

With the YouTube version there was probably around half an hour of faffing involved - writing the description, title, all the keywords, and so on, and editing the subtitles. YouTube's auto-generated subtitles are actually pretty good, but they contain no punctuation or capitalisation and sometimes get names or other words wrong - in screenshot below you can see it says 'you can get health and advice' which I had to edit to 'help and advice':

It's a relatively quick job and of course well worth doing to make sure your video is accessible. 

If you've watched the video above you'll have seen that the narration ends at least 10 seconds before the end - this is because I wanted space to link to another video (the more detailed virtual tour), a clickable thumbnail of which appears in the bottom left of the screen. This was achieved by inserting in YouTube itself, via the End Screens menu. As you can see below, the video itself is designed to receive the thumbnail in that exact position, with the arrow pointing to it. 

One final piece of admin was to create a custom Thumbnail for the Library Minute video itself. YouTube auto-generates three for you - normally none of them quite work as an encapsulation of the video, so you have to make your own (either from scratch or, more often in my case, just by taking a screenshot of the video at the best possible moment).

Step 5: Promotion

Even though the video is a piece of marketing, it still needed to be marketed... I saved a version for adding to Induction slides, and then created a slide in which it was embedded for everyone to add to their presentations.

We also tweeted it, put it on Instagram (where it did much less well than I expected, interestingly) and embedded it on key web pages such as our Info For New Students page.

And that's it! Videoscribe is a tool which we pay for on an annual basis - we don't often do this with so many great free tools available, but we feel it's worth it in this case. If you have any questions about the software or the video above, let us know in a comment... 

Understanding the experience of nursing students: part 2

In part 1 of this blog post I introduced our Nursing UX project and revealed some of our findings. In this follow up post I'll cover some further findings and tell you about what we're doing next.

Key findings continued

Students have a love/hate relationship with ebooks

It’s not news that academic libraries have embraced the ebook, but we seem to get a lot of conflicting feedback from students about them. Nursing UX showed that students like to have ebooks; the most consistent negative feedback was about ebook availability, which is perhaps not surprising given that nursing students spend so much of their time away from campus. It was very clear, however, that the actual experience of using an ebook was very often not an enjoyable one. Students presented very practical problems with everything they want to use being accessed through a PC or other single device. For example, one student commented:

If something is in print I can look at what I have typed and the literature, I can look at both at the same time with a simple turn of my head or glance of my eyes. If it is on my computer, I have to flick between the two screens or have a split screen so ... I much prefer print

This presents something of a challenge to the ways in which we provide resources. We have to continue to provide ebooks for their ease of access and to meet student expectations, but must also look at how we enable students to use them effectively. At York we’ve started to have conversations about providing second monitors so that students can work with two screens: one for their writing and another for the ebook. I’m very hopeful that this will start to open up access to resources in a transformative way, allowing students to make the best use of our range of online resources.

Ebooks: loved and loathed in equal measure

They’re also not mad about literature searching

How much help should we give students in learning to use databases? The answer varies hugely depending on the discipline, but in Health Sciences the answer has always been ‘quite a lot’. In recent years, however, I’ve been pushing students to take more personal responsibility for this learning - with mixed results. One student writes:

We do get a session on it but I feel like they are a quick whistle tour and you are sort of left to do it on your own. Which I guess university is all about being independent and work on your own anyway, but I do feel like you are very much left in the dark and you are meant to work that out yourself. I still don’t fully understand CINAHL and Medline but I do try to use them if I can

In fact they have multiple sessions about how to search for literature, but the student’s point still stands. They’ve rightly recognised that they need to be in the driver’s seat for their own learning, but feel lost as to how to get there. This gave me a lot to reflect on with my approach to teaching. I firmly believe that we shouldn’t be spoon-feeding students with skills teaching, but neither do I want to leave them feeling adrift without support. My revised approach to teaching should help, with my sessions immediately being followed by seminars in which students unpack the material with their lecturers. They then have flipped classroom activities to undertake with an optional drop-in for support. This approach seems to be effective; the students have to take an active role, but there is staged support and advice available.

It’s also important to remember that we’re not creating librarians. Yes student nurses need to know about searching for literature - it’s an important skill for their professional lives as well as their academic ones - but they don’t need to be experts and understand every nuance of every database. I’ve therefore taken a very pragmatic approach: give students enough detail and support for where they’re at, situated in their own experience and expectations. Time will tell if it’s a more successful approach, but it’s certainly been more satisfying to teach!

Searching for resources was surprisingly not the students' favourite pastime!

Starting to write essays is the worst

In the semi-structured interviews students spoke a lot about their approach to essay writing. I thought that students would speak a lot about struggling to find sources or not knowing about how to structure their thoughts; these issues certainly came up, but the consistent difficulty was students not being able to start writing. This comment sums it up nicely:

Starting [the essay] is definitely the most challenging… I could read for days and days and not write anything … I think getting past that barrier or the fear of failure is the most challenging

As a result of this, I’ve been working with the department’s lead for academic writing to rethink some of their support in this area. So far we’ve trialled a couple of ‘Shut Up and Write’ sessions timetabled specifically for the nursing students (we’d run this previously for PhD students but never at undergraduate level). The attendance wasn’t great at either session, but the students who came really valued it - either for dedicated writing time or as an opportunity for tailored feedback. We’re going to look at how we can plan these sessions for next year. Part of the challenge is finding times when the students are both on-campus and actually starting work on a summative assessment - not easy for any group, but especially ones who aren’t always around on campus.

The hardest part of essay writing was being faced with a blank page

A studious environment makes you feel more studious

Many of the students noted that they like working in the Library because it actually feels like they’re working.

I find that I really struggle to write unless I am in the library, so I find it quite an inspiring place to write and I have been up here till about 4 am just happily writing

I find it quite an inspiring building, being around all the books ... When I see other people studying I feel I can study … even my flatmates will all make the journey here and we use [group study rooms] in the evening, we just come in and it’s like a big community

That sense of community was a recurring theme for the students. They like studying in a way which connects them to their peers, especially given that they might not see people for long periods of time during placements. For that reason many of them make a beeline for the Nursing section in the Library; they might bump into their fellow nurses and have a sense of comfort, but they’re also somehow absorbing relevant knowledge from the books across the aisle. But what use was any of that to me? With such a captive audience, I was missing a trick by not targeting messages to them directly. I therefore decided to set up a noticeboard specifically for the nurses, located near to the books which they use most often. I know, it’s not going to change the world, but I think it’s been a useful way of flagging up some key information. Just don’t ask me to measure the success on that one!

Many students preferred working with their peers around them

What next?

I’m now busy working on the recommendations from the project. Some have been very easy to achieve: buying new editions and weeding old stock, setting up the comms plan. Others are beyond my immediate ability and will require a lot more thinking from the Library as a whole. What’s important, though, is we’ve got a really strong set of actions and a robust data set to inform future planning. We’re just embarking on a new way to oversee projects in the Library, and I’m very hopeful that Nursing UX will inspire a lot of these new pieces of work.

On a personal note it was hugely eye-opening to carry out this research, and it’s given me a fresh perspective on a lot of the issues which students raised. I was a student longer ago than I’d care to admit, so it’s easy to forget just what a learning curve it was. And I was never a student nurse with the added pressure of placements! Hopefully we’re starting to put things in place which will make students’ lives easier, but just by kicking off the conversation we’re doing just that.

How do these findings compare with observations from your own institutions? Let me know by leaving a comment below.

Understanding the experience of nursing students: part 1

What do nursing students want from their university library? That question was on my mind for a while, reinforced by a context of negative feedback and middling-at-best satisfaction. It was clear that we weren’t quite hitting the mark as a service, but what were we missing? In this blog post I’ll give you an overview of a project I ran to learn more about nursing students’ experience of the Library and to consider what changes we could introduce to their (and other students’) benefit. I’ll focus on my overall approach and some of the key outcomes from the project.

What was the aim?

This project, referred to in shorthand as Nursing UX, was designed to address the lack of granular feedback currently provided to the Library by nursing students. Whilst we did receive some feedback from students, this never felt detailed enough to make any meaningful service improvements. I therefore wanted to understand more about students’ current level of knowledge about the Library, and build on that to consider what more we and the department could be doing to support students. Ultimately I wanted to complete the research with a set of specific recommendations to take back to the Library’s Leadership Team.

As much as this was a project designed to support nursing students, I also wanted to make sure that - wherever possible - the recommendations would benefit other students in the department and perhaps even the University as a whole.

The research aimed to identify where we were missing the mark with students

What did the research involve?

I used a range of user experience (UX) methodologies in this project. If you’re not familiar with UX, take a look at some of the ways we’ve used it at York. The techniques were:

• Classroom voting, where I asked whole cohorts to complete a short questionnaire at the end of one of their lectures. This was designed to identify the overall level of knowledge of different library services in each cohort, as well as their general feelings and preferences for those services.
• Touchstone tours, in which students led me around the Library and explained how they use the space and what they like and dislike. This technique aimed to see what resources and services were a priority for students, but it was also illuminating to see what they didn’t mention on the tour.
• Semi-structured interviews, in which I asked students to draw a cognitive map of their process for writing an essay. This was the launching off point for a discussion about their academic experience generally, gradually focusing down to questions about their experience of using the Library.

I then brought together the results from all three methodologies, thankfully with the help of an intern who had much better capabilities with statistical analysis than me! For that reason I won’t go into the methodology, but I’ll talk about some of the key findings from the different elements of the research.

What were the key findings?

In this section I’ll give an overview of some of the key findings from the research - some surprising, some reinforcing things I’d heard elsewhere.

Comms, comms and more comms

One message came out very clearly in the results: students who have a greater knowledge of the Library are more likely to use either physical or electronic resources. Not rocket science perhaps, but it was nonetheless useful to confirm that it’s worth taking the time to ensure that students know about our services. I thought I was doing this relatively well, so it was a much needed wake up call to realise that lots of students hadn’t grasped some fairly basic introductory information. For example, one student commented:

I didn’t know about this until recently, that [YorSearch] will tell you exactly where it is in the library, it will give you a code … I would just walk up and down thinking ‘where the hell is this book’!

This is despite me having talked about this numerous times in teaching sessions and through classroom activities, so clearly something wasn’t quite clicking for some students. It was really worrying to me that many students might have been in the same boat, and were too anxious to ask for help (more on that below). I therefore created a comms plan for how I would get messages to students, incorporating face-to-face opportunities and email follow up. This has been in place this academic year and seems to be working well, although it’s sometimes been a challenge finding time in busy periods for this kind of bespoke interaction. It’s been worth it, however, as it’s given me more face time and, hopefully, credibility with the students.

I’ve also learned not to be afraid to repeat things. Even if many people in the room already know about it, there might be that one person who’s still wondering the shelves looking for a book! There’s a fine balance here, of course, as we also want students to become independent and to ask for help when they need it.

Our messages to students were sometimes getting muddled or forgotten

Students’ anxiety is a real problem

It’s easy to forget that many students will never have stepped foot in a library before, let alone one of the scale of an academic library. No wonder then that students they’ve reported feeling overwhelmed. One student sums it up perfectly:

When you come to the library it’s really daunting, because you’ve got loads of people who know what they’re doing, sat at desks, typing away.

This isn’t the only time I’ve heard this feedback from students, so it clearly wasn’t limited just to the nursing students. It did seem, however, to be a more widespread issue within this group. This is ultimately a crucial issue for academic libraries; our universities will expect students to be making use of our resources, but many appear too intimidated to do so. Nursing UX showed that students who used the Library more frequently were more likely to provide more positive feedback. There is absolutely, then, a vested interest for libraries to encourage students to use our services; it’s for their benefit, but also means that we get a positive result for what is becoming a key metric.

So how do we make students feel welcome and not overwhelmed? I have no ‘lightning in a bottle’ answers sadly (add a comment if you do!), and this is something we’re still thinking about here at York. It’s at least partly to do with what students see when they enter the building (read more on this from our UX Space project), but it also means breaking down barriers to support. We’ve got a really helpful and friendly group of staff at our Help Desk, but many students seem worried to approach them for assistance. Roving help might be a way forward - going to students at the point of need - but we’ve got some more thinking to do on this. For now it’s really illuminating to know that students have that anxiety about using the Library, so talking to them openly and honestly about their concerns can only be a good thing.

Some students felt too intimidated to use the Library. Hardly the warm welcome we were aiming for

That's it for now. Check back next week for part 2, where I'll talk about some of the other findings and what we're doing as a result.