I’ve felt lately that I am trying to row upstream when getting faculty and students to use our research guides. They have great content, we discuss them in instruction sessions, and we prominently feature them on our webpage. In spite of this though they are not used nearly as much as I think they should be.
This summer, I spent time brainstorming ways to market the guides to increase usage and it hit me that maybe I’m going about the process all wrong. I’m trying to promote a resource to students that is outside the typical resources they use. Our students use the university’s learning management system, Moodle, extensively. It is the way they access courses and communicate with their professors and fellow classmates.
We have integrated links in Moodle directly to the library, but based on our Google Analytics students go directly from the library homepage to the databases. They don’t frequently traffic other parts of the website. So instead of rowing upstream, what if we start using Moodle? I’m still brainstorming what this could look like but here are a few ideas:
- Enroll students in a library course (I’ve seen this done, but I’m not sure it is the best fit for my institution)
- Create lessons and pages in Moodle that faculty can import into their own courses
- Work more closely with the instructional design team to include library resources in the courses
How do you use the LMS to encourage student use of the library?