As my capstone project for my placement at Steenbock Library, I decided to design and craft a series of instructional videos. However, I felt that making a single video for students' use was a little to ordinary for what I wanted to accomplish; I am very interested in the back-end assessment of instruction sessions. I was curious about what tools are available and how to effectively create assessments for use in these sessions.
Because of this, it became obvious that students (or patrons) would not be the audience for the videos. While students in the School of Library and Information Studies would no doubt enjoy and potentially utilize the Assessment Tutorial, the primary target audience would be instructional librarians. For the purposes of the assignment, I assumed this tutorial would be used primarily by Steenbock staff.
I got down to research for the various tools, as well as the best assessment practices. While undergoing my research, I discovered that a single video touching on these topics would likely be too cluttered and may run a little long. After discussing my intentions for the video with my site supervisors, we came to an elegant conclusion: the tutorial would be three distinct, bite-size videos.
Video One is for the tools needed. I researched the several services available to UW-Madison faculty and staff: Qualtrics, which is one of the more preferred options, was a standout and so got top billing in the video. However, I made sure to investigate and outline the benefits and drawback of the Quiz function in Captivate and the built in survey tools in Learn@UW. I tried to take a non-biased tone in order to prevent the viewer from favoring any one service.
Video Two is devoted to proper and effective assessment techniques. I outlined some of the major do's and don'ts while writing assessment questions. I wanted to ensure that the viewer became aware of common issues when writing assessments, like how to recognize when they're writing a leading question. I hoped to make sure that instructors became aware of their potential biases in order to attain usable and effective feedback from learners.
Video Three is the shortest of the bunch and touches on some ways an assessor might read their results. The learning goal here was to instruct and ensure that instructors can read their results and what some trends might mean. I took the reports and findings from the Bio152 assessment as well as some research from Qualtrics' tutorial sites in order to parse down the trends into easily-understandable portions.
The majority of my research was from the services themselves; the tutorials for the Qualtrics training was immensely useful for one who has no previous assessment experience (such as myself), and that may have been a fine source to point all the instructors to. However, these tutorials clock in at about 3 hours worth of total work, so the ability to get that information down to a reasonable length was paramount. Additionally, I had to do quite a bit of experimentation on Adobe Captivate in order to come up with a good system to create surveys as opposed to quizzes. And finally, as I said earlier, I drew on the experience of Brooke Williams to best write and create the final video.
My only wish would be to have more overall time to work on the videos. I spent a lot of time crafting the concept for the videos and writing them that I have precious little time to make them particularly polished. As it stands right now, I only have 1.5 of the videos entirely done, although I don't consider one video finished until I have them all done.
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