Tag: eLearning

Title: Framework for Information Literacy Videos

Audience: College students at Bucknell and beyond

Date: Summer 2022

Software Utilized for the Project: Vyond and Audacity

About the Project: These six videos were created in the summer of 2023 for Bucknell University. My supervisor was enthusiastic about creating more tutorials (videos or interactive) on information literacy topics. It seemed logical to invest time in creating videos for the six big ideas of information literacy as outlined in the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL’s) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education document. While similar videos have been created by other academic libraries, they tended to be limited to two or three minutes and I feel that these complex ideas need a bit more time to be appropriately represented.

I wrote the scripts with feedback from a colleague, Ally Wood. I have also infused my understanding of rhetoric as it relates to information literacy throughout these videos. The videos were developed in Vyond, using Audacity to record the voiceovers and music from Bucknell’s subscription to the Storyblocks database. I chose a video format and the whiteboard animation style as I felt these suited these theoretical topics.

These are being marketed to Bucknell faculty to incorporate into their classes, but I was careful to keep these institution-neutral (even if they do frequently reference higher education) so that they could be used by librarians at other institutions. This choice was inspired by the viral success of my Goblin Threat game at Lycoming College.

The links on this portfolio go to my YouTube channel, but these six videos are officially posted on the LibraryITBucknell channel, where the statistics show each video has been viewed about 300-600 times. A year after they were created, another librarian reached out to me to ask if he could use them with his students, pointing out that they were not officially labeled with Creative Commons licenses, which was quickly remedied. This shows that they are being valued by my librarian peers.

Title: Common Reading 2023: Sitting Pretty

Audience: First-Year students at Bucknell University

Date: Summer 2023

Software Utilized for the Project: Vyond, Audacity, and Adobe Premier Rush

About the Project: When I began working at Bucknell University in 2022, one of the first things I volunteered to be a part of was the Common Reading selection committee. I was pleased to be successful in advocating for a disability-themed book, Rebekah Taussig’s Sitting Pretty. I also volunteered to create the video that would be posted in the campus learning management system (Moodle).

Dr. Taussig makes it clear that she writes primarily from her perspective as a wheelchair user even as she connects her experience to the broader disability literature. One of my instructional goals is to help students understand that disability experiences are very broad, and they happen all around us even if we don’t see them.

Working with the director of the Office of Accessibility Resources (OAR), we put out a call for volunteers from the Bucknell community to share their disability experiences. Some allowed me to interview them in person, others were more comfortable responding by email. I sorted the responses into categories to show trends for the “Voices of Disability” portion of the video. I also interviewed two professors and the director of the OAR to show other aspects of disability at Bucknell, and then put it all together using Vyond for the animation, and Adobe Premier Rush to assemble the entire video.

In this project, I prioritized sensitivity and anonymity to my participants. While I was concerned the choice to make all participants anonymous may contribute to the stigma of disability, their safety and comfort were my top priority. I did not want them to feel any pressure to disclose.

I sent the almost-finalized video to the participants to confirm they were comfortable with how I represented them. There was some negotiation and changes required before it was truly finalized. I also got their permission to make this video public beyond its intended purpose.

I am pleased with how the final project turned out and hope that it added to students’ common reading experience in a way that has a positive impact on their lives and the lives of those around them.

Title: Synthesis Strategies for Research Papers

Audience: Bucknell University students

Date: Fall 2022

Software Utilized for the Project: Articulate Storyline, Audacity, and Adobe XD for mock-ups

About the Project: While students consistently say that selecting a topic is the hardest part of a research project, research and feedback from some professors indicates that they also struggle with synthesizing information from multiple sources. I find this to be the hardest part of the research process and it is at the highest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. A neuroscience professor I worked closely with observed her upper-level students tended to write literature reviews that were arranged by source, like annotated bibliographies, rather than grouping information based on topic.

Students clearly need more help with understanding what synthesis is and some strategies on how to do it, but they are not at the point of need for these skills when professors invite me to their classes, which tends to be at the beginning of the research process. An online tutorial can be used at the point of need, either voluntarily by students or it can be assigned by a professor.

This project ended up taking two different paths simultaneously. I used this project for my Introduction to Instructional Design course, but ended up building it faster at work than the course assignments allowed for.

My instructional design documentation shows a deliberate process, but the final interactive tutorial I built for my library has fewer assessment questions. The reason for this is that within the Instructional Design course, we were designing stand-alone learning objects and all learning objectives needed to be assessed within the tutorial. In contrast, while I offer this tutorial on the library website, I am also marketing it to faculty who then have the option of assigning mind maps and note cards to students as part of the mini assignments built into the research process within their coursework. The existing tutorial is interactive and asks students to demonstrate an understanding of the material presented, but not all learning objectives are assessed within the tutorial, and that is appropriate for the real-world context of the tutorial.

Title: eBooks from OverDrive to Kindle

Audience: OverDrive and Kindle users

Date: Spring 2022

Software Utilized for the Project: Adobe Captivate

About the Project: This software simulation lesson was created in Adobe Captivate for my Introduction to Authoring course in Spring 2022.

My public library subscribes to OverDrive and I frequently use it to download audiobooks to my phone. However, previous attempts to download eBooks to a dedicated eReader used to require special software and a physical USB connection. I found it tedious and had stopped using my public library’s OverDrive eBook collection.

At the time of this assignment, I had recently discovered that improvements in technologies have made downloading OverDrive’s eBooks to my Kindle much easier. I wanted to create a lesson to share how easy it is and hopefully encourage people to take advantage of the thousands of free eBooks their public library offers.

The learning objectives for this lesson were:

Upon completion of this course, the learner will:

• Locate OverDrive
• Log into OverDrive with their public library card number
• Select an eBook to digitally borrow
• Send it to their Kindle

I love these interactive software simulations. I believe having real hands-on experience with immediate feedback is a very valuable way to train employees on how to use a new software or do a new process that involves software.

I imagine one downside is these software simulations probably have to be recreated fairly often as software interfaces change so often. Even small differences between what is shown in an online tutorial and the live software learners are trying to use can add barriers to successfully using the software in the real world. Still, these are an important tool for corporate training.

Title: The Context of Dracula

Audience: First-year students

Date: Spring 2022

Software Utilized for the Project: Articulate Storyline and Audacity

About the Project: I have twice taught a first-year seminar on vampires and one of the first texts we read is Bram Stoker’s Dracula in its entirety. It is by far the most important work on vampires in the English language and it does a great job of setting up a key theme of the class, which is the concept of perspective. However, the novel is very long and takes up nearly a third of the class. Students are much more engaged with the more modern short stories that use vampires to explore social issues and have asked for more time with those. As one part of cutting down class time spent on Dracula, I would like to give them a homework lesson on the context of the novel. This would be posted in the campus LMS (Moodle), which I already used for keeping track of grades, so keeping track of lesson completion would be streamlined.

I created this interactive lesson in Articulate Storyline for my Introduction to Authoring course in Spring 2022. The lesson was designed to meet the following learning objectives:

After engaging with this online lesson, students will be able to:

• Name the author of Dracula and a few key facts about him
• Define “epistolary novel”
• Recite some of the characteristics of Victorian England and Gothic literature
• Place the novel Dracula in a timeline of other well-known pieces of vampire literature

I am particularly proud of the timeline as it required some advanced trigger programming that was beyond what was taught in the course. It originally had images of the book covers, but I removed them when I was unsure about copyright. Upon further reflection, the book covers would have added a lot to the experience and I cannot imagine that any publisher would have cared if I had used the images of the covers, as it would be promoting their books.

I hope to one day have the opportunity to teach this class again. This will be one important tool in condensing our time spent on Dracula so we can spend more time on more modern vampire stories.