The meeting was held online via Zoom. Ellie Horowitz from Dominican College facilitated.
How are other instruction librarians handling things this semester?
New Paltz is in session until the end of June, and they are not able to use synchronous learning.
There is an interest in assessment.
OC: The college is not compensating distance learning in the same way they are compensating in-person learning. Is there union talk about distance learning? At the school – the district moved vacation to the first week while they figured out the legalities. Then the teachers got professional development. There was an agreement that they would only have to do one live session a week. Every live session needs to be posted by Friday so the students knew what to expect the following week.
In NP: Since some of the teachers and students didn’t all have their own computer, the district decided that there would be no one-to-one live meetings. It’s strange because you lose the connection, but good because you can work whenever you want.
SOCSD is a one to one district. Lucky us.
Creating videos for next year:
If professors want to create a video for their class, the professors need to give participatory credit for the class. One of the professors at OC gave a quiz based on a library instruction video so students could get credit for watching it.
Getting teacher buy-in is always going to be good!
eBooks – what do you do with all the different platforms for electronic books? It’s impossible to know what can be found in what place. Moving everything to Zora will give access to all different kinds of systems. At this point, buying paperbacks and mailing them would be cheaper than buying ebooks.
Dominican has a course reserve website for all the books that they can find for free. Created by the access services librarian in a clear spreadsheet on where the items are held. Other than that, students are responsible for their own books.
The high school issue could be considered temporary -the kids don’t like the ebooks and mostly want physical copies. They might recede again when people go back to in-person classes. But what do we do in the meantime to get the biggest bang for your buck?
Can public high schools still provide physical books to students if you know ahead a time of what you need? Set them up for contact-less pickup?
Was there something successful you did as far as instruction that was successful this semester?
Dominican: created asynchronous content, a video tutorials and materials. The students posted their findings on a discussion board on blackboard. It was the most effective use of the discussion board that she has seen in that format. It was proof that the students were engaging in content, and it could work for assessments.
OC: did two pandemic sessions, one where she worked with an instructor to create a tutorial.
Bard: Figuring out how to make it interactive led to the best solutions. They saw bigger turnouts in optional workshops, possibly because the students had nothing else to do? One workshop on how to do your senior project research was very well attended. They used breakout rooms in Zoom to make them into a cohort.
It’s hard to do assessment when you are just posting videos and not using live one on one classes. Bard moved to Zoom after a little bit of Google, using breakout rooms and seeing everyone at once was the most important.
What are your plans for the summer?
Rethinking the library orientation for students during regular orientation. At Bard, they’ll be using Zoom to do a more straight-forward introduction to keep things simple. They won’t be doing in-person outreach even if people are on campus.
Maybe create an online Bingo game or breakout room or something hands-on or interactive.
Request: meet again this summer to talk about orientation.