Chris Patterson and I attended the ACRL conference and presented a poster entitled, "Making the Connection: Conducting Virtual Focus Groups with Distance Adult Learners." It was a success! Many people were curious to hear about how we held these focus groups with students located all over the world and how we manually analyzed the results.
I also hosted a roundtable: "Assessing Services for Non-Traditional Populations: How to Best Reach Our Users at a Distance", which included 6 participants and a lively discussion!
ACRL is always a dynamic conference and we learned a lot to take back to our colleagues.
Here are some highlights:
- Reframing information literacy as metaliteracy
- Focusing on Hispanic students-fastest growing population, game changers: http://www.erialproject.org/
- Shifting to more point of need assistance. For example, database tutorials in the database description, not on a separate tutorials page. Put in strategic places in blackboard as well.
- Convincing students we are real- create more personalized content including intro videos, images, etc.
- TungleMe- tool that can be used to let users schedule virtual office consultations
- Research at one panel showed that undergrads do not think at the discipline level and therefore are not fully utilizing or noticing subject guides. They need a course name in order to make the connection.
- Adopt a system for assessment management-organize data by outcome, not by silo (i.e. the assessment). It will then be in one place when you get the call about the value of the library for student learning.
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