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LibraryDen

This is a guide about the online information literacy course, LibraryDen, created by Anne Barnhart and Ingram Library

History of LibraryDen

History of LibraryDen

LibraryDen was created in the Spring 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic obligated universities to enhance and increase their online learning opportunities. LibraryDen was developed as an online information literacy course with auto-graded content that could be scaled to reach a near limitless number of students simultaneously. The goals were to create an asynchronous online learning object that was scalable and sustainable to support students and faculty, many of whom were pivoting to online learning and teaching for the first time.

Ingram Library previously had adapted LibraryDIY, an online learning suite created by Meredith Farkas, Amy Hofer, Lisa Molinelli, and Kimberly Wilson-St. Clair from Portland State University Library. (In 2014 The Portland State University Library team was award the ACRL Instruction Section Innovation Award for their work on LibraryDIY). LibraryDIY is designed for students to seek answers in a self-service manner; it is not designed as a course.

For LibraryDen, we selected a subset of approximately 45 pages from LibraryDIY and organized them into an instructional sequence.  Each page has a brief optional self-assessment for students to check their learning. We arranged the pages into eight thematic modules and created auto-graded quizzes for each, reusing the questions students had practiced with on the self-assessments. Across the self-assessments students review more than 200 questions; there are 100 questions that are also on the quizzes. LibraryDen includes a pre-test and a post-test that have different questions than the set used on the quizzes. The pre and post-tests assess the same concepts but with different questions. We decided to use different questions so that we could measure the students' learning as opposed to the students' ability to recognize questions and remember the right answers. 

Due to the pandemic, LibraryDen was designed, built, and tested in a remote and distributed manner. Ingram Library staff created questions for the tests and student workers from Ingram Library and other areas across campus were employed as testers, a job they could complete from their homes (one international student did the work from her home country after returning home in March 2020). Please see LibraryDen Team for a list of acknowledgements.

The name LibraryDen was chosen since UWG's Course Management System is locally branded as CourseDen (UWG's mascot is a wolf named Wolfie and wolf-themed branding is commonly used around campus). 

We are thrilled that LibraryDen was the 2021 Innovation in Instruction award recipient from the American Library Association's Library Instruction Round Table!

Creative Commons License
LibraryDen by Ingram Library, University of West Georgia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.