FEATURE
Adopting Google Slides for Adaptable Tutorials
by Jean Cook
| Faculty members from across the university were asking for plug-and-play tutorials that they could use in their classes through the D2L course management system.
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Even prior to the pandemic, Ingram Library at the University of West Georgia was undergoing many changes. In summer 2019, the university president installed a new library dean who led the library through an extensive reorganization. Previously, the instructional services department administered reference, outreach, and instructional needs for the campus, most notably through its liaison program. For the program, which was first adopted in the early 2000s, each department on campus was assigned an individual librarian who would reach out to faculty members, create customized research guides and learning objects as needed, and handle any of that department’s instruction or collection needs.
As part of the reorganization, instructional services was divided into the marketing and outreach department and the learning and research services (LRS) department. The LRS team was charged with overhauling the liaison program. They started with a holistic review of its strengths and weaknesses, looked at similar programs at other institutions, and then proposed a redesign that reflected the current needs of the campus. This was made more urgent in summer 2020 when the university, as a whole, was realigned into fewer colleges with larger departments covering multiple disciplines. By fall 2020, a new liaison framework was adopted that focused more on the research and instructional needs of specific programs and ensured that each of the newly formed departments had a specific librarian to cover their collection development needs.
During their review of the liaison program, the LRS team conducted interviews with all previous liaisons about the needs of their departments, as well as a series of open discussions with faculty members about what they would like from the library. Faculty members from across the university were asking for plug-and-play tutorials that they could use in their classes through the D2L course management system (CMS). They wanted to be able to import the tutorials and adjust them as needed, placing library skills in context with their other content and assignments. Regardless of discipline, faculty members were asking for topics such as basic database searching, finding peer-reviewed research, and identifying primary sources. The library liaisons also reported that they were regularly creating tutorials or other learning objects for faculty members who requested these topics.
These existing tutorials posed several issues. To start, liaisons were creating them individually and at the point of need. This meant that liaisons would often duplicate each other’s efforts. Tutorials were wildly disparate in style and content. There was no standardization to the library brand or with regard to accessibility needs. Depending on the liaison’s skill and level of comfort with technology, these tutorials might consist of written instructions, images, videos, links to articles, or other tutorials. They could be a 1,000-word essay, a list of videos on one page, or a full module of interactive content with a quiz as an assessment.
Once the content was uploaded into the CMS for the class, librarians lost long-term control over it. Some programs had standard templates that were incorporated into every course. Some classes with embedded librarians were then copied as the foundation for future semesters. These templates would include the library resources built on static pages, but the librarian might not be invited to access the class in the new semester. Without specifically being added to each new class each semester, librarians could not update the materials. If they were invited in, they had to update every new class individually. This resulted in students and faculty members finding out-of-date information or trying to use broken forms and links to access the library or contact their liaison.
During summer 2020, the LRS team developed a series of new multidisciplinary tutorials that could be imported into the CMS and then used by faculty members as they saw fit. The team consulted with UWG Online and campus IT services on ways to keep persistent access to the tutorials after they were imported into CMS-based classes. They recommended using a dynamically created web object to maintain control over the material. Since the university used Google Workspace to manage email, calendars, online meetings, and collaborative documents, the LRS team decided to utilize the Google Drive suite of programs to create, organize, and distribute the tutorials. These programs allow you to share and embed documents in other websites. They also provide support for accessibility tools such as screen readers and screen magnifiers. After some experimentation, the team found they could create static CMS pages and modules that would load and display the latest version of embedded Google Drive documents. Faculty members could take that static page or module and place it anywhere in their course (i.e., before assignments, in the middle of content modules, or in course templates). They could copy it between sections as they would any other page. On the back end, librarians could update a single tutorial file through their Google Drive, and the change would be automatically reflected in any static page that had the embedded file.
Initially, the LRS team tried to create tutorials using Google Docs, which is the Microsoft Word equivalent in Google Drive. They quickly found that it had limited capabilities in terms of layout and incorporating non-text media. Conversely, Google Slides could support text, images, audio, and videos in a robust manner while offering much better layout options. Once embedded into a static CMS page, the slides would display in a player with arrow buttons to navigate forward and backward through the presentation, as well as give users the option to expand to full screen.
Once they settled on utilizing Google Slides to host the tutorials, the LRS team brainstormed a number of common information literacy requests from their departments, the liaison interviews, and faculty discussions. Over summer 2020, they developed 10 tutorials, such as Finding Books, Finding Articles, What Are Scholarly Sources?, and Introducing Library Services to First Year Students. A single librarian created the first draft for each tutorial and then shared it with the rest of the LRS team for comments and revision. The team consisted of librarians from a variety of areas, which means the tutorials were multidisciplinary with examples from lots of different programs. The Google Slides format drove several user-friendly design decisions. Individual slides could not be too text-heavy and needed to make good use of white space to draw attention. At a maximum, most slides had just a paragraph or two and fewer than 150 words of text. Librarians were able to easily include examples from popular media, the databases, and the internet. For many of the topics, the team could take advantage of existing library learning objects such as YouTube videos or charts created for previous classes. As for length, the team decided that tutorials should not take more than 20 minutes to review. That way, students wouldn’t be overwhelmed, and they’d have plenty of opportunity to practice the skill in each tutorial. Every tutorial ended with a standard set of slides that linked students to the library homepage, places to ask for help, and the relevant page of the Library DIY—which is a completely accessible text-based learning object with instructions for a wide variety of library skills.
Once the tutorials were imported into a CMS class and incorporated in a static form by the faculty, there were few ways the LRS team could actually track their use. Hence, each tutorial was paired in a module with an assessment using Google Forms. Each tutorial received its own assessment, and these Google Forms were similarly embedded into their own static CMS pages. After completing the tutorial, students would be taken to a page with a form that requested their course number and some identifying information and asked two to three assessment questions regarding the tutorial content. Librarians could pull this identifying information for faculty members who wanted a full roster of those who completed the tutorial as well as track which courses were using the tutorials at any given time. All assessments and tutorials were created, organized, and shared through shared folders in Google Drive.
Once the tutorials and assessments were finalized, the LRS team created a CMS module for each tutorial. This consisted of a general introduction to the material, a static page with the embedded Google Slides presentation and instructions on how to progress through it, and a static page with the embedded Google Forms assessment. These modules were then exported into zip files that could be shared with faculty members. The team created a research guide with pages for each tutorial, which included an embedded version of the Google Slide presentation, the zip file for faculty members, and instructions for importing the zip file into a specific CMS course. The zip files were password-protected, but faculty members could get that password by asking their library liaison. This served two purposes: It let the team know the interest in each tutorial, and it opened communication between faculty members and liaisons so they could make suggestions and offer customized help if needed.
While the Google Drive suite of programs is fairly user-friendly, the LRS team hit some obstacles along the way. It helped to have a member with some knowledge of web systems, the CMS, and HTML. Embedding the documents into the CMS involved some experimentation and minor HTML coding. For instance, when Google Slides creates an embed code, it defaults to advancing the slide every 3 seconds. Users can adjust this for times of up to a minute, but if the slide includes a video longer than that duration, it may auto-advance prematurely. Once the team had the HTML embed code from Google, they were able to adjust the times up in the HTML editors of our research guides and the CMS. Similarly, the team adjusted the size parameters for each document to better fit the CMS design.
Since the University of West Georgia uses Google Workspace, the librarians had the opportunity to limit access to tutorials and assessments to university-only Google accounts. For assessments in particular, this meant they could automatically gather identification information such as email addresses. This feature required students to be logged into their Google account in the browser, and it caused access issues within the CMS depending on how students logged in. Ultimately, the team decided to keep the Google documents open to all. The Google Slides presentations could then be more easily embedded and shared both in and out of the CMS, and the assessments were never linked anywhere besides the password-protected zip files.
The initial 10 tutorials were rolled out to faculty in fall 2020. Going forward, the LRS team will work with marketing and outreach as well as the library liaisons to increase the visibility and use of these materials. They will be integrated into existing library materials (such as research guides, websites, and the Library DIY). The team will work toward better accessibility by improving captions for existing videos and images and developing alternative materials for those who need them. The LRS team is already planning a second suite of tutorials that are more specific to programs with high-level research requirements. As needed, the tutorials will continue to be updated as the library systems and website change. Google Drive ensures this process will be painless and automatic, no matter how many different classes use our materials.
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