Library Course Assignment Pages : Helping Students with Research Skills

Like all undergraduates, students in natural resource fields need guidance in locating information for research projects and papers. Students, unaware of the wealth of information in libraries, rely primarily on familiar Internet sources for their scholarly work, often to the dismay of their instructors. Librarians have long collaborated with faculty to help students approach and access library resources through in-person instruction, print guides to research, and online help pages. OSU Libraries developed Interactive Course Assignment (ICA) web pages to highlight library resources in a more attractive and useful way. ICA pages display the most relevant library resources for a particular class or research assignment on one web page. These are dynamic web pages that integrate Web 2.0 features, chat and RSS feeds, etc. with traditional library content, such as catalogs and article databases. Using these pages, students quickly target research tools and information to successfully complete their assignments. The fresh design of the ICA pages gives OSU librarians a product to showcase with faculty, and a way to start a conversation about how to help students improve their research skills and resulting research papers and projects. Librarians partner with faculty to promote the pages and encourage student use. Preliminary feedback from students and faculty indicates that both find the pages helpful. In this session we will discuss the benefits of course-specific web pages and show some of the OSU pages. We will focus on how librarians collaborate and interact with faculty to create the pages, how they can be used in online education, and how students react to and use the pages