Designing successful workshops for digital tools

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to document the strategies adopted at The University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign's library to improve open workshops in which digital tools are used to teach two digital databases. Workshops that were not geared toward one particular group of people required different marketing, design and teaching strategies from those developed for one particular patron class. Design/methodology/approach To demonstrate the difference in both marketing and teaching strategies for such workshops, both were offered multiple times over the course of both semesters of the academic year 2005‐2006. All workshops were advertised to the campus community via multiple marketing outlets and registration was limited to 20. The instructors gathered information from both observation and post‐workshop evaluation forms. Findings The key finding of this work was a formula for successful digital workshops offered to a large and diverse academic community. With thoughtful advertising and course design and creating a learning‐centered environment, such workshops could be successful. Originality/value Best practices and other tips for creating successful workshops for digital tools provide a formula for other librarians to use as they begin to teach digital tools on a more regular basis. As the number of digital resources continue to grow, so too will the need to teach users how to use them effectively and properly.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.