This blog post talks about the importance of thinking about the outcomes, measures and supports for any successful education (or really any) project. That discussion reminded me of a project that we took on at the ASU libraries, where I work as the Web Librarian. We wanted very much to create new videos that we could put on our website. Our first go-round with this project was pretty much a failure! And the problem was that we didn't think about the outcomes, measures and supports.
Unsuccessful Attempt
At the beginning of the project we were really excited about the idea of creating great videos that would publicize the library and serve as learning objects that could be accessed by our on-campus students as well as distance students. So while the enthusiasm was there, the practical planning side of things wasn't. Our biggest failure in the beginning was to think about our outcomes -- what did we want students to learn from these videos? What educational problems would they solve? Without a clear idea of the purpose of the videos we were struggling with the content they should include. Eventually we did create some videos -- we decided that a virtual tour of the library would be a good place to start. We posted them to the website, and saw that they got very little use. We should have asked students beforehand what they thought of them -- to try to get some measure of the students' reactions to them. Did they think they were lame? Or just not useful? And finally, we also failed to think about the supports needed for the project. We wanted to include many library staff members -- our Digital Media Studio employees who had the technological expertise as well as our librarians with their content expertise. But too many cooks in the kitchen generally just led to frustration for everyone involved. We also realized that our vision of scores of videos was unsustainable given our level of staffing.
Successful Attempt
Our second go-round with this project was just more successful. We thought about the outcomes, measures, and supports. We decided that the videos would really be much more useful to students if they focused on educational problems that so many students have when doing college-level research. So we created videos about how to do citations, how to find relevant journal articles on a topic, how to find primary sources. The expected outcomes for students was much more focused for these videos. We also took better measures -- we created quizzes that went along with the tutorials. Students go through all the videos and then take a quiz, which is often included by professors as part of the students' grades. We were able to see what videos were working, and which weren't. We also scaled back our vision of what the video tutorials would be. Rather than dozens of tutorials, we decided it was better to focus on creating a small collection of the highest quality videos we could make. Thinking about the supports available for the project helped us keep the project at a manageable and sustainable level.
