It Takes a Village: Sharing Open Library Instructional Content with the University Community

Though Laura Haygood and Alessia Cavazos come from two different areas of expertise, as members of the Experiential Learning team at UTA Libraries, they are no strangers to instruction. Whether Laura is assisting nursing students online with research or Alessia is setting up events for the library, they are both familiar with the struggles that students and teachers face with online learning. Laura Haygood is an Experiential Learning and Nursing Librarian and Alessia Cavazos is a Library Specialist in Community and Outreach—but both are passionate about teaching. Laura and Alessia co-authored this blog post.  

The teaching we do in the library is in no way insignificant. During a normal school year, our courses offer students the chance to learn what their professors may not have time to teach them in class—research, writing, how to identify credible sources, how to properly cite and format a paper, and more. Aside from giving professors a break and allowing for a bit of variety in the schedule, by offering these classes in our library, we also offer the students an opportunity to connect a face and a place to a resource. Once they have had a class with us, they know they can come to the library for more help (tutoring, research assistance, tech lending, etc.). The library no longer feels like a strange foreign place, and the help of a librarian or a tutor seems more accessible.  

So, what happens now that students aren’t attending in person classes, and the physical space of the library is closed?  

It’s been our mission at UTA libraries to stretch ourselves in order to extend our services to our students and faculty, even if we cannot be physically present for them. Offering digitization, 24/7 chat services, and yes, online instruction, has become a vital part of reassuring our academic community that they are not alone, and helping them stay afloat during these ever-changing times. For this reason, we have decided to make our courses freely accessible in the Canvas Commons. 

The libraries offer many courses that professors may add to their curriculum. Traditionally, librarians teach these 50-minute sessions in a library classroom. Professors may choose from workshops such as Fake News, Academic Integrity/Plagiarism, Citation Help, Finding Sources, and Research/Writing. When classes shifted online in March, we began plans to move these library sessions online, as well.  

We initially contacted the instructors whose classes were already scheduled for library sessions, offering synchronous and asynchronous options. We found that the easiest way to make these courses available was to upload them to the Canvas Commons. The Canvas Commons is a space where educators may create learning modules that other educators can then pull into their courses. Contributors may choose whether to make their modules available to everyone who uses Canvas or limit them to use by their local university.  

 Once we had added our workshops to the Commons, we emailed the instructors who already had workshops scheduled, informing them how to add the modules to their courses. While these courses were originally created for the First Year Writing Program, these workshops are available to anyone at the university who would like to use them. 

Academic Integrity — The Academic Integrity workshop is designed to be engaging to students and help them understand what plagiarism means in the real world. Students are introduced to a variety of “content stealing” across media— including stolen tweets from Twitter, and copied speeches from first ladies. The workshop uses videos and text to engage the student, and a script for the voice over is made available as well. The workshop also references Yale Poorvu’s guide on academic integrity and UTA’s Code of Conduct, and answers questions like: What is plagiarism? And, what are the different ways one can plagiarize?

Citation Help — Because these classes were created for the English department, the workshop that is currently available in Commons is focused on MLA, however, we can offer courses on other citation methods upon request. The MLA workshop is a video presentation designed to assist students in understanding their role as writers, and why citation styles are important for entering into their various academic conversations. Often students wonder why they must use a certain citation style, or why it is important to cite certain ways— so this workshop aims to answer those questions while also helping students learn how to incorporate quotes and citations into their work without losing their own writing voice. Formatting, style, parenthetical citation, and framing quotes are all covered in this workshop. A script of the voiceover for the video is available.  

Fake News - This session focuses on the four moves one can take to evaluate information. This hands-on workshop teaches students to think critically about the topic and provides them with the tools to investigate claims. In the module, students are given a link to a news story to read. Then, the students watch a video walk-through on how to use the 4 moves to assess a news story. Students are then given the opportunity for independent practice and are supplied with another news story and a worksheet prompting reflection. 

Since instruction will continue online for the summer term, we will be adding additional instruction content to Commons. This content will include a Finding Sources workshop, teaching students the basics of rhetoric and demonstrating how to search for information. In this session, we show students how to locate resources that they may then use to form their position when writing. We also discuss ethos, pathos, and logos, and how they should be considered when reading an argument or framing one of your own.  

We will also be adding additional content for nursing and other health sciences classes. We currently have two modules geared toward the health sciences: Keyword Searching and Advanced Searching. We will be adding a video recording to this content, demonstrating library resources and walking students through a search in a health-related database. 

If you would like to add one of these workshops to your course in Canvas, you can do so by visiting the Commons-- located on the left menu in Canvas. In the search bar, type your search term, then filter. Click Filter on the right, scroll to the very bottom, and click "The University of Texas at Arlington" under Shared With.

For the following courses, search "first year writing program":

• Citation Help
• Academic Integrity
• Fake News
• Finding Sources

For the health sciences courses on database searching, enter "Laura Haygood" in the search bar.

We created these workshops to alleviate some of the stress on students and faculty during this tumultuous period. By making these workshops available to everyone at the university, we hope to lighten the load on faculty, as they can simply add these workshops to their courses. We hope these workshops serve students by equipping them to be excellent users of information. In the current climate of disinformation and the unreliability of social media, we want students to have the skills to search for, assess, and cite accurate information.