Clare Boucher

Biography

Having worked in the Civil Service for four years, Clare left to live in Australia and raise a family.  After returning to work as a part-time library assistant, she decided to train as a librarian.  She qualified in 1999 and since then has been working on the Health Science team at the library of the University of Wales Swansea.

Abstract - You can't learn it all in one day!  Using e-learning to re-inforce information skills teaching

This presentation describes the development and use of online tutorials for teaching information skills to students of the School of Health Science, at the University of Wales Swansea.

Group-teaching cannot always take account of the various ways in which people learn. Sometimes there is insufficient time to cover everything, or you just don't want to overload the students. For many, the skills learnt in the classroom will desert them when - possibly weeks later - they are searching the evidence-base for assignments and/or practice. Online tutorials offer a way to reinforce classroom teaching, cover things that could only be touched on in the limited amount of class-time, and go some
way to catering for different learning styles.

We used basic Microsoft software (PowerPoint) to create online tutorials, presentations, with lots of screen shots, to take students through
the mechanics of searching various databases, and to teach them how to construct a search and focus a question. Students could then use these to refresh their skills when they needed to, and they could control the speed at which they worked through a tutorial.

The tutorials were then mounted on Blackboard, a virtual learning environment. This gave us the ability to create short, interactive quizzes as follow-ups to the tutorials. It also provided us with usage statistics.

Would these tutorials be time-consuming to produce and more cumbersome to update than the print guides? Would the students use them? How accessible would they be for distance students on a slow internet connection?

What we found was that the tutorials were not hard to construct, nor cumbersome to update. Downloading tutorials off campus could be slow, and so we had to look at ways to overcome this. Student usage was intermittent, and was usually greatest in the week following a classroom session.

There have been several beneficial spinoffs. In addition to these tutorials, we began to create electronic folders on Blackboard with useful tips/guides to finding statistics, Research Instruments, etc. These have proved very popular, and have been useful in reducing frequent requests for the same information at the Enquiry Desk. In March 2004, academic modules began to be put onto Blackboard. Working with academic staff, we have been able to incorporate our tutorials within the mainstream of the students' courses.

For the foreseeable future, group information skills classes will remain the prime method of training, and there will always be the need for some one-on-one sessions. However, online tutorials are important because they are there when the student needs to be reminded how to search efficiently; when they need guidance in using a database and are unable to come to the library; and because they offer constant reinforcement of information skills teaching.

This page was last updated on: 7 June, 2004