#LILAC24 Cultivating quality: student-driven enhancement of digital learning materials

Pam McKinney live blogging from the final session of the LILAC conference. Rebecca Mogg from Cardiff University is presenting "Cultivating quality: student-driven enhancement of digital learning materials". Rebecca is the education lead for the library at Cardiff University, and supports staff with their information literacy teaching. The university has over 350 digital learning objects across the service, and a lot of resources are offered in both English and Welsh. They want to make sure that there is a constant cycle of improvement and a desire to ensure that students can meaningfully contribute to the design.
They use a SharePoint inventory to keep track of all the digital learning objects, which has an owner for each resource with an annual review date, and records of where the resource is stored and how it is used. Every resource owner gets an automated reminder 30 days before the annual review date, and then more reminders until they update it. They also use Google Analytics on the resources to understand use and engagement of the resources to support continuous improvement.
The library has a policy of co-creating new content with students to make sure it is aligned with student needs, uses accessible language and covers material in ways that students like. Students are also involved in UX activities and take part as actors in the videos. This is funded through the Student Champions scheme at the University which pays students to work.
They gather student feedback on resources with Google Forms, every tutorial has a form embedded in it and these forms are monitored weekly. Since they implemented the forms in August 2021 they have had over 22,000 responses, some responses are minimal, but they do get signposts for improvement.  For example, a piece of feedback they received on the "Welcome to the Library" tutorial was that it wasn't very interactive, and this prompted the team to revise this tutorial, embed a quiz in it and make it a little bit more interactive. Even though these are only small pockets of feedback, it does inform the general improvement of library online materials.
The library can also use the engagement data and student feedback in order to develop their strategic approach to the provision of asynchronous teaching,  They can understand which resources are the most popular, to make sure that these are the ones that are supported first when there are software changes. One issue is the proliferation of platforms on which they provide content, so an activity for the future would be to consolidate these in some way.