At the start of the year, Fiona and I started work on the Schools Outreach project, carrying on from the face to face work done between UC library and Waimea College up in Nelson. Our mandate was to deliver online this year, which we did on 10 March. We had a blast with the project, and we thought we’d pass on a few of our lessons learned, hoping they’ll be helpful for working at a distance, and delivering using Adobe Connect.
Everyone has to be motivated: considerable planning was required even for a single lesson. If either we or Waimea’s librarian, Dinah, had been unmotivated, the results would have been poor. Lesson: Make sure that everyone cares enough to make it happen.
Technology will betray you: both in terms of communicating with our school partners, and preparing to deliver the session, we met technological setbacks in abundance. Be prepared for tech to fail at any moment, and recognise that it might well be someone else’s tech causing the problem, or it could be ours.
Adobe Connect is good, but…: We found Connect fairly easy to use, but because we were working with a group of students in a single location, and because the video windows are small, it was almost impossible to really see how engaged the students were. Be prepared to operate without timely feedback!
Multiple presenters changes the pace: Fiona and I both felt that changing presenter frequently gave a change of pace, and the students responded well to it.
High School Cohort: Targeting our information literacy content at high school students required a bit of a rethink of how to engage the students (because this wasn’t going to be related to a specific assignment). To that end, we demonstrated databases using the topic of “How to become internet famous?” and used a lot of memes and images. We also used interactive games like Kahoot. On reflection, there is not that much difference between high schoolers and the first year cohort so it was a good opportunity to reflect on how we plan and deliver our workshops.
Instinctively, it feels like there is value in connecting with potential students in this way and the feedback indicated students valued the session. However, we’re not sure how you would measure the impact of this service (so as to justify it as a regular service).