Graduate Work 101 2.0: An Online Tutorial to Meet the Information Needs of Graduate Students at UMass Boston

Healey Library is faced with the same problems that plague many of us at UMass Boston: How do we offer innovative, student-centered services with limited funding, staffing, and resources? Additionally, as UMass Boston grows into its mission as a research-extensive university, we find ourselves facing a new set of challenges in supporting growing populations of graduate students and their research projects. One consistent theme that emerges through conversations with faculty and administration is that graduate students seem underprepared to tackle information seeking and research management in today’s digital landscape. Many students have been out of school for long enough that the information world has changed completely; and many students arrive at UMass Boston without having learned upper-level research and scholarly communication skills in their undergraduate programs. While Healey Library has always had a strong relationship with the undergraduate curriculum in our library instruction program, the challenge we face now is: How do we meet the needs of our graduate students, who are spread all over the campus (and all over the world), and who span so many different disciplines? And how do we do this with the resources we have at hand? Our proposed solution to this challenge is to develop an online course in graduate-level information literacy and research skills—the first step in the library’s longer-term strategy of developing reusable online content as a way of meeting the information and research needs of the entire UMass Boston population (and beyond). In this session, we will present the development of this online course for graduate students, including the needs analysis process, the design and development, and our plans for implementation and evaluation. In the process of this discussion, we will ask participants to consider such questions as: How does online instruction challenge our views on teaching? What distinguishes graduate-level research from undergraduate research? What are the boundaries between core information literacy skills and more specialized disciplinary research practices? The session will also take a workshop approach, as participants will be able to have hands-on experience with some preliminary lessons in the course and will be able to provide feedback and suggestions for the further development of the course and reflect on the challenges and opportunities of implementing a standalone online course