Evolution of the Information Literacy Tutorial Sarah Morehouse & Heather Shalhoub Empire State College Library, Saratoga Springs, NY About Empire State College About the Empire State College Library The ever evolving practice of teaching Information Literacy at a distance through an online tutorial. Conclusions & Looking to the Future About LibGuides CMS and v2 as the Hosting Platform Printed by SUNY Empire State College Print Shop Empire State College has 34 locations in 7 regions throughout New York state. Students enrolled in our learning centers attend through a combination of personalized faculty-guided study, online courses, and participation in small study groups. This combination offers busy, working adults a rewarding and personalized way to earn a degree. We also have locations overseas. In 1971, Empire State College was chartered within the SUNY system as a distance learning college for adult and nontraditional students. Until 1997, our students relied on other SUNY libraries for research and learning support. In 1997, the online library and learning resource center was established and has continued to grow. We now have four full-time librarians and a well-rounded collection of e-books, online journals, reference resources, and databases of images and videos. Our collections are entirely online and our services are delivered to our users wherever they are by Internet, telephone, mail, and UPS. Reference and other library services are provided by the college's professional librarians during day, evening and weekend hours via , phone, chat and the Web. The online library provides access to a vast collection of online resources and services for research and study, including: databases containing: full-text journal articles and newspaper articles e-books and reference e-books digital images videos audio recordings subject guides containing the best research tools and information resources for each subject area Ask a Librarian service to answer reference questions library workshops library and research tutorials support and help with accessing materials through other libraries Alumni have free, lifelong access to the Alumni Library, which is a separate sub-set of the college's online library. Lotus Notes Webpage: Based on the Information Literacy Tutorial created by Ulster County Community College in response to the 1997 SCLD Information Literacy Initiative. It can currently only be viewed by looking it up in the Internet Archive WayBack Machine. WordPress – The Commons (2010) Complete revision of the content. Less wordy, more images. Prettier, easier navigation. Normalized use of the Web in research. Less focus on how to use specific search tools. Much heavier emphasis on critical thinking. New platform allowed us to update it whenever needed. Interactive quizzes. Still available until the end of August. The Beginning – Notes Based Webpage WordPress Blog WordPress Blog – Take 2 WordPress – The Commons Take 2 Security concerns with WordPress led to the removal of themes and plug-ins that made the Information Skills Tutorial navigable. Also, we were strongly encouraged to remove academic content from the platform that the college wanted to be used only for blogging. Moodle LMS Moodle LMS (2014) Great platform with integrated quizzes and assignment submission. Version control in Moodle is amazing. Another advantage of the platform was that faculty could have their own copy of the course. But… Due to college policy, we were going to have to have two versions – one for enrolled students and one for guests. And then we found out that we couldn’t link to individual pages in the course! Finally - LibGuides CMS Two things have remained constant through the various iterations: 1.It’s meant to serve three functions: a)Professors can have their students complete it as part of their course work b)Students can complete it independently c)Each page is a single-serving tutorial on an important library/research concept. 2.It’s organized around a Research Portfolio that takes the student from developing their research topic, searching, evaluating sources, citing. They create an annotated bibliography. Two things have changed: 1.We keep getting better platforms and being able to integrate more multimedia and interactive content 2.We keep paring down the how to basics to make more room for addressing the critical thinking aspects. We’ve had LibGuides since We upgraded to LibGuides v2 and CMS this past winter. One of the main reasons was so we could more easily use it as a platform for the tutorial. What’s involved in the conversion? Sign up and pay for it Delete accounts and guides that aren’t being used, because you won’t want to deal with them. Clean up your guides (especially content that is being reused, or could be) Clean up your links – get rid of duplicates, make the descriptions nice Decide what’s going to be a database asset v. a link asset… put the database assets in and map them to subjects, content types Set up the look/feel of the new site (CSS is awesome!) Integrate LibAnswers or whatever other widgets you want Ask them to migrate your content over Clean up your content in the new site (occasionally some things get rearranged – no big deal but you’ll want to catch it before you go live) Map the individual guides to guide types (subject guide, course guide, topic guide, internal guide, etc.) Ask them to flip the switch to make you go live (you may have to get your IT people to change a setting here and there.) Congratulations! You are now live! If you had a static A to Z list, switch the links to the new dynamically generated one, because it is amazing. Why is it better? Let me count the ways!!! CSS is central instead of having to be embedded in each page Either tabs or side-bar navigation More logical dashboard and editing controls – much faster to create and edit a guide. It’s an actual CMS with assets (databases, links, images) that are managed centrally. Oh wow, now you can make widgets from anything!!! There’s an approval workflow. Integrated LibSurveys – great for quizzes and well… surveys. Expansion of content: Copyright, Privacy, Transparency, Censorship, Equity of access, etc. Badging: Our faculty want a quick and easy way to verify that their students have taken the tutorial. The college’s Metaliteracy site already uses badges, and we could coordinate with that. We already have self-quizzes. There’s also Research Portfolio assignments, but those need to be assessed by hand, so that would be a super-charged next level of badge.