The Chemistry Librarian and the Digital Education Librarian will present their collaborative work on creating digital learning objects (DLOs) for teaching information literacy to chemistry students.<br/>One of the emerging primary needs for academic libraries is to provide students with subject specialized information literacy instruction. This demand creates an increasing teaching workload on liaison librarians. To sustain this workload while providing other essential university services, we considered implementing DLOs for teaching specialized information literacy instruction to chemistry students. DLOs have been demonstrated to provide effective, flexible, economical, facilitated, and interactive training to students. <br/>The goal of our DLO is to enhance students’ information literacy skills by offering a simple and interactive tool that will assist students in preparing a bibliography for a scientific paper. Writing experimental reports or literature reviews is a common assignment for many STEM classes and creating a properly formatted bibliography is an important component of this assignment. Undergraduate students are generally unfamiliar with the concepts such as writing a bibliography, or finding the scholarly sources, or proper referencing someone else’s work and our DLO addresses this gap in students' literacy skills. In our DLO, we adopt the formatting style of the American Chemical Society (ACS). Our DLO also covers general topics such as defining scholarly sources and importance of citing someone else’s work.<br/>In this presentation, we will demonstrate our collaboration strategies as well as various aspects we considered while working on DLO’s design. Those include selection of the most suitable module building software, accessibility considerations to meet the library’s goals of providing diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) for all users, creative uses of technology to assess students’ learning, and successful approaches to inter-departmental collaboration. We will share our strategies regarding the module’s distribution and pilot testing. This presentation will be of interest to a broad audience that includes liaison librarians, instructors for undergraduate and graduate chemistry courses, instructional designers, instruction librarians, online learning librarians and instructors, and any teacher or student.<br/>

Creating digital learning objects for chemistry

2019 Fall National Meeting

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