During the rapid shift to online programming & teaching due to the COVID-19 crisis, it became increasingly apparent that Higher Education Librarians needed to reframe instruction & outreach methods. During this session, three librarians from the Mobius Consortium will discuss how COVID-19 impacted their instruction, outreach, and programing initiatives.
Camille Abdel-Jawad, Assistant Professor and Instruction & Outreach Librarian from Park University saw this shift as an opportunity to cater more towards Park's unique education model. Park University has a rich history of online education, with large populations of both non-traditional students and military-affiliated students, and while Park was fully equipped at offering robust distance education opportunities, those efforts hadn’t been translated well to supporting distance education students effectively at the library. In an effort to change this in the Fall 2020 semester, Camille implemented a new system for her library for reference support and instruction through a scheduling application that students can use at any time. She also tried new virtual outreach and programming initiative methods, including Zoom Events, Instagram Live, Instagram Reels and TikToks, as well as utilizing LibApps software to create a multi-modal engagement experience for distance education students during the 2020 election.
At Metropolitan Community College-Kansas City, a Community College that supports students at multiple campuses, as well as online and distance learners, Head Librarian of the Longview Campus Diane Martin organized a series of online book chats, titled Wolfpack Book Chats. The Book Chats offered an opportunity to discuss books, audiobooks, movies, TV shows, or podcasts they students and staff enjoyed recently. The book chat was deliberately designed to be an open, inviting, and inclusive event that, instead of discussing one book in particular, aimed to recreate the casual conversations about pop-culture that usually happened in the physical library.
Meanwhile, Bradley Kuykendall, Reference and Instruction Librarian at Lincoln University, a smaller university with mostly on-campus students, faced new challenges with instruction. During the pandemic Lincoln University could not conduct any one-shot instructions in-person, and rapidly shifted to providing instruction via Zoom. Although this seems like a fairly simple task, not all students had the same access to technology or internet, which proved difficult for providing access to students.
This roundtable will offer stories and testimonies of both the successes and pitfalls of online reference, instruction, outreach, and programming during the Fall 2020-Spring 2021 semester.