William Paterson University of New JerseyDavid & Lorraine Cheng Library
William Paterson University in Wayne is one of the nine state colleges and universities in New Jersey. The campus is located just 20 miles west of New York City and has more than 11,000 students.
Contact: Nancy Weiner r Tony Joachim
What prompted you to start developing online tutorials for your users and how long have you been providing them?
We started developing tutorials using Powerpoint in 2003-2004 for First Year Seminar classes. The PP slides were included in all FYS course shells (we use Blackboard as our course management system) and we also provided a link to them on our library page. They were pretty basic and provided an overview of searching the library catalog, searching a database for articles, citing sources and the difference between scholarly vs. popular. They were static and not very exciting! ;-)
What are your criteria for the creation of an online tutorial? (patron request, staff input, library subsidized resources, project driven)
The ones developed for FYS are project driven and we are expected to update this information every year. We have also developed some tutorials at the request of faculty and we also have developed tutorials based upon librarian feedback.
How do you leverage a tutorial once it is created? (i.e. multiple access points, marketing, promotion, etc.)
The tutorials are promoted during relevant library instruction sessions and they are prominently featuredon the library homepage. There are various links to the tutorials and they are also promotedto faculty teaching online courses and to faculty teaching courses at a satellite campus.
How do you evaluate/review your online tutorials? (Staff review, user review)
We do not have a formal system in place to review/evaluate the tutorials but staff preview them prior to having them go “live” on the webpage.
What software do you use to create your tutorials? Please tell us what you like and don’t like about the software.
I have used a combination of different programs to put my tutorials together. Originally, I was using some open source screen capture tools, but found that there would be too much work to do on the files after the fact. Instead, we purchased a copy of Adobe Captivate, which works alright for our needs, although I have had some difficulty getting it to do exactly what I want, as well. Of the video-based tutorials, I edited the screen capture with text and arrows, and converted them to Flash video. I had already created an interface in Adobe Flash CS3, and simply dropped the video in, with slight modifications.
For the Scholarly v. Popular tutorial, I built it entirely in Flash, although this took quite a bit longer to accomplish.
Audio was either recorded in Captivate, or using Audacity, which was also used to edit some of the Captivate audio.
How do you find staff time and expertise to develop the tutorials?
At the moment, I am the only person actively working on tutorial development, although I have gotten feedback and help with audio recording from a number of my colleagues.
As for time? As you are probably aware, tutorial development does take a lot of dedicated time to script, record, and produce. This has been a constant challenge, although I was able to set aside a ‘project day’, once a week, during the production of the video tutorials. Each Thursday for the entire semester, our Head of Reference tried not to schedule me on the desk, and I made efforts to limit committee meetings during this time. I was also able to work from home occasionally, which came in handy when recording audio and focusing on the actual scripting of segments. These things would have been difficult to accomplish with the normal distractions of working in a busy reference office.
In an ideal world, there would be at least one more person assisting with this process, and an ongoing ‘project day’ schedule whenever tutorials were in development.
Do you track or measure tutorial usage? If so, how do you do it?
At the moment, little has been done to track usage. Each tutorial has an optional feedback form and quiz, allowing users to comment on their experiences and self-assess. We are able to check page hits, although without quiz feedback, it is unclear how many users actually finish each module.
In the case of the video tutorials… they are intended to be used ‘on demand’, although we have discussed incorporating them into bibliographic instruction (having students complete certain modules before the live class).
What are your plans for the future with your tutorials? Do you plan to create more? If so how often? Will you be removing tutorials from the site on a regular basis? If so, how will you determine which ones?
Not sure what direction we will go in with the tutorials. They can be time consuming to create and it is problematic when a database interface is changed and our tutorial no longer has the same appearance as the new interface of a database. This is one of the deciding factors when in removing a tutorial.
Do you have any advice or tips for a library that might want to launch an online tutorial project for their users?
Creating generic tutorials, (such as the ones we have about Scholarly vs Popular, Reserve Items, etc) seems to make more sense since if a tutorial is created about using a specific database or other source, your library has no control over when the appearance of that resource may change, making the tutorial outdated.
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Developing Online Patron Tutorials