Collaborating with Teaching Faculty on Transparent Assignment Design

In light of a campus-wide curricular change at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), the University Libraries created Faculty Institutes to build capacity for effective teaching and assessment practices campus-wide. The UNLV Libraries Faculty Institutes are multi-day workshops designed and delivered by librarians to help teaching faculty create courses and assignments that are research-rich and closely aligned with the newly launched General Education learning outcomes. This chapter provides the situational factors leading to the overhaul of General Education at UNLV and how librarians leveraged this opportunity to maximize their role as experts in information literacy and instructional design. This chapter also describes how librarians used instructional design principles for creating significant learning experiences1 and transparent assignment design2 to guide the development and delivery of the Faculty Institutes. Finally, we draw on our experiences to suggest that the interdisciplinarity and specialized skills of librarians make us particularly poised to be leaders of curricular transformation at our institutions