Thought some people might be interested in our (attempts at offering) library skills sessions last week.

Inspired by Education Library’s InformEd checklist we created a checklist of 15 basic library skills and an offer of a 30min group session for students who wanted to learn more. We made it easy to sign up — the checklist was handed out by ENGR101 tutors to their students, and students only needed to write in their email address, circle the time(s) they could attend, and hand the form back to the tutors, who forwarded them to me.

Read more for results….

We received back 39 forms with both an email address (but two bounced) and a time circled, 10 forms with only an email address, and 66 forms with neither (some of the tutors misunderstood the instructions and collected all the forms in their class). This was actually quite an exciting response – we hadn’t expected many takers – but though I emailed the 47 valid emails to either confirm their time or to offer additional times that might suit, only 3 people actually turned up for sessions.

Whether it was the timing of the offer (things are getting pretty busy for ENGR101 students with the major design project ramping up to the exam period – one of the people who turned up thought the start of term 2 might be better) or just not something students were sufficiently motivated to attend is hard to tell.

On the bright side, we did get some data out of it about what students at least think they know after a few months at uni – see the Excel spreadsheet for a pretty bar graph and raw (anonymous) data. (The checklist and handout are in the same folder.)

I also forwarded the tutorial handout to the 44 other students who’d provided email address, along with a plug of our blog, and looking at our blog stats since it looks like as many as 9 may have followed that link from the email. So hopefully they’ve also skimmed through the handout and learned something new…