We met recently for our fourth successful ‘teach meet’ session, focusing on information literacy for online learners.
Rowena Stewart – School of Health in Social Science spoke about using Camtasia to record information literacy sessions on finding information for patients and on systematic reviews for healthcare information.
Fiona Brown – School of Veterinary Medicine spoke about using Learn for library induction with online and campus based MSc programmes and online CPD programmes for vets. Collaborate is used to give live, interactive, seminars to the students. Fiona managed discussion boards and online course resource lists using Talis Aspire, supporting an Academic Study Skills course for taught postgraduates.
Marshall Dozier – School of Medicine spoke about being a co-leader on the introductory skills module of the MSc Internal Medicine course covering evidence-based information literacy. This involved detailed support of live tutorial discussions using Collaborate, and offering formative feedback in the course VLE discussion boards on a critical review of an article. She showed a similar example from the MSc Clinical trials, where the discussion boards were used to have students report exploratory literature searches and to provide formative feedback.
Ten tips for successful information skills online
- When working with video screen casts, it’s much easier if you write a script before you start, and you will need this to be made available at the end anyway for accessibility purposes
- Chunk up your presentations to avoid students downloading large files – 7-10 mins is plenty
- Check out your equipment and recording space carefully – IS Skills and E-learning teams can help
- Be aware that creating and managing online learning activities can be very time-consuming
- Team working with academic staff and elearning staff is crucial for making things happen
- A strategic push from the School for online learning creates opportunities for information literacy involvement
- With courses which require a strong evidence base as part of professional practice it’s easy to demonstrate a need for information skills
- The use of ‘peer tutors’ from experienced student community is very helpful in managing bigger numbers of students doing discussion board activities (e.g. What databases do you use…)
- Student comments can be extracted for FAQs for future courses
- Smaller scale courses enable course by course intensive support (more challenging to provide this on a larger scale).
Discussion points from the session
– Could Camtasia recorded sessions be reused?
– Is there anything IS can do better about sharing experience of creating online learning objects?
– How do we move to the level of engagement MVM have with online information literacy with other Schools?
– How do we move from a situation where there are bits and pieces of good practice to a more uniform approach?
Useful resources
Guide to podcasting equipment and software
IS Skills Wiki guide to Camtasia (University of Edinburgh only)
https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/ISSC/Producing+a+screencast+video
Get Library Smart – follow the information skills blog at http://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/infoskills/
Brought to you by the Library Academic Support Team, University of Edinburgh
