 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Amber Welch. I'm the Head of Technology Enhanced Learning at the University of Texas Libraries. Thank you for coming to this presentation. Before we get started, if you happen to have a mobile device or a laptop with you, be aware that these slides are accessible to you and you may want to reference them because I'm going to be going into some detailed information later in the presentation that I expect many of you will have questions about and I've linked some detailed resources for you. It's a bitly link and then the handle is CNI underscore Welch. So it's just a bitly and then CNI underscore Welch. So today we're going to be talking about leveraging data to monitor makerspace demographics. I'm going to start out by giving you a brief history of the foundry as well as some institutional context about what's going on at UT. I'm going to talk to you about our goal for our data gathering practices and I'm going to talk to you about some of the impediments to achieving those goals. The foundry is an approximately 4,000 square foot makerspace which is located in the Fine Arts Library branch of the UT library system. It was created with funding from the Hearst Foundations, which was then supplemented by funds from the Provost Office, the University of Texas Libraries, as well as the College of Fine Arts. It is a joint initiative of the College of Fine Arts and UT Libraries and in part this is because of an anticipated curricular need that was thought about several years ago whenever the Center for Arts and Entertainment Technologies started to come online. That Center is now a department and that department has faculty offices that are located one level up in the Fine Arts Library branch. So there are faculty offices upstairs from this makerspace and there are also renovated classrooms where arts and entertainment technology students are taking classes. They anticipated needing access to makerspace resources as they were bringing this this program online. So that was one of the reasons for the placement of of the foundry. It opened in September of 2016. That fall we primarily focused on allowing our staff time to get acclimated to the equipment. We were getting the equipment up and running. We were also in the process of developing patron workflows. So what would a patron have to do in order to use a specific piece of equipment? This these workflows were developed in partnership with the Office of Environmental Health and Safety. I'm going to use EHS for short throughout this presentation. That's the campus entity that is concerned with student safety and with making sure that patrons are provided with necessary information in order to safely use the space. In the spring of 2017 as well as this past semester, so fall 2017, we began to integrate foundry resources into the curriculum and I would say that this is a major priority for us right now. We are thrilled whenever any patron walks into our space and wants to use it, but we're really concerned with developing high-impact partnerships with faculty and integrating the resources into the curriculum, not only within the College of Fine Arts, but also across campus. Our Makerspace is unique at UT in that we are currently the only Makerspace that is accessible to anyone on campus irrespective of departmental affiliation. All of the rest of these Makerspaces faculty and students have to be affiliates of the school or college. Rather than just talking to you about the space, I thought that it might be helpful to give you a brief tour of the space. This video does not have sound. Sorry about that. These are Mac Pro computers. They have gaming capabilities. They are accessible to any student that wants to use them. This is our video wall. Note that there is no boundary between the Fine Arts Library reading room and our Makerspace. It's just an open space that you can walk into. There are three bays. We have bays to enable teaching, sort of more intimate teaching practices. We have a laser cutter, 3D printers, mills, and electronics area, and this is our fiber arts lab. On the right, you see the reading room in the Fine Arts Library. This is our pilot virtual reality space, and I say that because we are not super happy with the placement of that virtual reality setup, but also because it's enabling us to learn more about our patron expectations of a virtual reality service. This is our recording studio, which has a soundproof booth, and it is by far one of the most popular things that we provide access to. It's constantly booked. So as we were bringing the space online, we were also in the process of developing an assessment plan for the space. This is an assessment plan that is not only internal to UT libraries, but also that goes up through central UT. As part of developing that assessment plan, we started having conversations about what we felt the real value add was to the campus community about our space. So I already noted that we're the only space that's accessible to every patron on campus. But what we learned through those conversations with UT library staff is that we felt pretty strongly that we should play a role in breaking down barriers to makerspace access. And so rather than just paying lip service to that and saying we have a makerspace, we want to break down barriers to makerspaces, we decided that we wanted to hold ourselves more accountable and set some standards for progress. And so we essentially wanted to create a holistic assessment plan that was designed around a mission statement. Before we go into more detail about the assessment plan, I want to mention some barriers. There are shared barriers for engaging with makerspaces that I think are somewhat universal at all institutions. At previous CNI discussions, I know that gender has been addressed. I think that is a well-known problem or a challenge, but there are also unique barriers that each institution faces. And so I wanted to give you a sense of what some of the barriers are to our patrons that want to engage with our space. The first barrier is a barrier of simply of perception. So a lot of people walk into the physical space and they feel intimidated and they tell us that they feel intimidated. And this is coming from all levels within the organization. That's undergraduate, graduate students as well as faculty. We have an iSchool at UT and we partner with a lot of those graduate students to give them pre-professional training. A lot of those individuals are interested in managing makerspaces, but they'll come to me and they'll say, I don't even know where to start. So there's this perceived, there's this perception that you have to be an expert to even walk into the space, which of course is what we are there to do. We're there to help people develop expertise. Another perceived barrier that came to mind for me as we were bringing this space online is what happens whenever you start to develop disciplinary subcultures in a space. So a good example of this is the College of Engineering Makerspace. The culture and the climate in that physical space is very different than the climate and the culture that we were striving to create in our space. So whenever I started to think about data and our patron population, what I wanted to see is, I wanted to look at a pie chart of colleges and departments that are using our space and I really wanted to see a pie chart that was fairly evenly distributed. I didn't want to see a lot of dominance by anyone, college or department. Compliance. I've mentioned EHS requirements. I would say that compliance is a huge barrier to access to our space. Whenever we first started partnering with EHS, they gave us a list of steps that an individual would need to take in order to get access to and begin to use our 3D printers. I felt that that list was way too long and that it was a huge barrier, so I entered into a period of negotiation with them and was able to reduce the requirements for engaging with 3D printers. However, that has not been the case for all of our equipment. The laser cutter, for example, has pretty stringent requirements for certification and I think at this point it's fair to say that it will be primarily used by faculty and ambitious graduate students. So the issue of gender was also something that we were very mindful of whenever we were bringing the space online. I think that gender representation in makerspaces has been discussed quite a bit, but I do want to share with you a quote that really struck me as we were developing an assessment plan for the space. This is from a 2014 piece, The Maker Movement in Education, by Erica Halberson and Kimberly Sheridan. In a 2013 keynote address at Stanford's FAB Learn conference on digital fabrication and education, Leah Buckley described the make organization as being focused on a narrow range of maker activities, primarily robotics, electronics, and vehicles and an even narrower range of makers with 85% of its magazine covers featuring white boys and men. So I'm not sure what the percentage of the covers for make magazine look like at this point, but whenever we considered gender in our space and demographics at large, what we really wanted to strive to do is create a space that's representative of our campus population at large and do that through the face of the foundry, which is primarily our wonderful student staff. So we really tried to be mindful about our hiring practices. I'm going to talk a little bit more about data and gender in just a bit. So what actions are we taking? I mentioned that we were in the process of developing an assessment plan. The first step to solidifying that assessment plan was to create a mission statement that we could ground our assessment plan in. So we landed on the foundry strives to provide access to an interdisciplinary, constructivist, inclusive learning space that encourages students, faculty, and staff to explore the practice of making. Again, I've noted our desire to have a truly interdisciplinary space. Inclusive is also something that we wanted to strive for. Jane Carr, who is the New York Times education life editor, said diversity is one thing and inclusion is another. And that's something that I think about all the time. We can get a diverse population in our space, but that does not mean that people feel welcome there. So we decided early on that we wanted to take a closer look at not only how patrons were engaging with our space, but also how they were feeling and how they are feeling when they're in our space. So how do we do that? Well, we use patron surveys. And our end of, we do it once a year, we have a patron survey that asks patrons questions about whether or not they had a goal for their visit to the foundry. We ask them about their quality, the quality of service that they received. And we also ask them if they feel welcome in the space. And we ask for feedback if they did not feel welcome. This survey is delivered, well, it's managed by Qualtrics, but it's delivered, the primary platform for delivery is Canvas. Canvas is the Campus Learning Management System at UT. And it is also an incredibly important tool for us with respect to gathering data about our patrons. So early on in the patron workflow process, we decided that we wanted to commit to creating a Canvas course about our makerspace. And it's broken into modules. There is one module for each piece of equipment that a patron may want to engage with or use. And so whenever someone says, I am interested in using the foundry, what do I do? The first thing we ask that they do is to just join the Canvas course. It's an open enrollment course. And there's about a 90% chance that any questions that they have will be answered by engaging with that course. We also see Canvas as a platform for reducing barriers to access. Let's say a patron walks into the space, they feel somewhat intimidated, but they've already joined the Canvas course. So then they go home and they take a look at the Canvas course. And they learn more about how some of this technology is being used in the real world. They're able to watch tutorial videos that have students in them. And so they're able to do a little bit of independent learning, which may give them enough confidence to say, hey, I can do this and come back. Canvas is also a platform for events management for us. So what that means is if we are hosting, visiting artists in residence and they're doing a lecture or if we're offering a workshop, patrons can sign up to take a class. Primarily, we are using it for certifications. So we offer laser cutter trainings and 3D printer trainings and patrons go in. They sign up for a class and they are registered. It also acts as an informal method of community building for us. We've found that a lot of our students will just IM with us through Canvas and that's really nice. So we've really tried to encourage that behavior because it enables, it allows them to feel like they're invested in the space and that they're getting some return on that investment. So we regularly have patrons complain about stuff, tell us that things are going wrong or right and we like to hear that. We also use an inclusive teaching practices document. I'm not going to go into detail about that because it's not as closely related to data, but I did want to mention it as a method for reducing barriers to access because it goes over some important pedagogical practices like not using overly technical jargon whenever you are providing an introductory certification to a patron. So what are some of our data gathering challenges and also what are other systems that we are gathering data from in order to create a more holistic picture about our patron population? I've already mentioned Canvas and I'm going to just start there because it's really the biggest source of data and it's also the biggest challenge with respect to gathering data. Every time a patron joins, we have the information about that patron. So we know what department they're affiliated with. We get gender information. We can gather more information about them as an individual. With respect to reporting, Canvas, the Canvas platform out of the box is far behind Moodle and Blackboard with respect to easily being able to export data about a course. So for example, in Moodle and Blackboard, you can get item level data. So you can look at your PDFs and your videos and you can see how many people are accessing those items. That's incredibly helpful when figuring out what's important to include in a course and what's not. Also, I mentioned events. It would be wonderful if I could hit export at the end of every month and get a list of events as well as the number of attendees at those events. Canvas does not offer that out of the box. Instead, at this point, we're doing manual counting of those events. That's not a sustainable practice. Sierra is an integrated library system, which we use to update patron status. So when a patron gets certified to use a 3D printer, for example, they then have an updated patron status. And what that means is that when they go to the service desk at the library and they say, I want to check out a 3D printer, I want to use a 3D printer, the student sitting at the desk scans their card and then they can see that patron has been updated and certified to use a 3D printer. We do not allow patrons to connect their own laptops to our 3D printers. And there are a number of reasons for that. But one of the benefits of that is that we can get checkout data about how frequently these pieces of equipment are being utilized. Qualtrics. I've mentioned that we use Qualtrics as the platform or the tool for delivering patient surveys. It's a wonderful tool for aggregating data and reporting. Qualtrics is also used for us to fulfill an environmental health and safety reporting requirement. So every time a patron gets certified to use a piece of equipment, EHS requires that that patron sign a waiver that essentially says that they have been presented with safety information appropriate to using that piece of equipment. EHS used to keep that data in paper form. So I proposed that we migrate to a digital tool for record keeping. I had an ulterior motive for that. And that motive was that I wanted more patron data. And I wanted it to be quickly accessible. So now whenever a patron gets certified, they do a digital sign off using their EID. And I'm going to talk more about this in just a minute and where we're going with that. So good tool, very solid. LibGuides, widely used in libraries. They have a nice space booking tool, which is what we use to enable patrons to reserve space in the recording studio. So when a patron engages with our website, the back end of that is actually LibGuides. LibGuides gives us helpful data and it's easily exportable. We can get information about unique patron reservations, average space reserve time, other things that are of use to us. We are currently using KeyServer to monitor software usage on the builds in our makerspace. We're going to be migrating to Jamf in the future, which I think will be a little bit more useful. So some of the data that we were getting, it's easily exportable and grabbable and other stuff. It requires manual aggregation. So that's one of the challenges. So what type of data do we currently have and what does the patron snapshot look like as of right now? So this data is from November 2016 to September 2017. I should note that this the total count here is 450 patrons. So as of right now, we have around 900 patrons in our Canvas course. We're getting ready to do our next big data poll at the end of this semester. So it will be interesting to see what this looks like. But for almost the first year, we were very happy to see current departmental usage looking like this. You can see that arts and entertainment technology does take up a somewhat smaller but larger chunk of the pie. But we're not seeing major domination by any one department or school. So we want to keep going in this direction. This is our school breakdown. We've had heavy usage from natural sciences, the graduate school, the College of Fine Arts, which we would expect because it's located in the fine arts geographic region on campus. And also engineering. We have been truly shocked at the number of engineering students that are using our space. And I say that because they have a very large maker space and it's actually a space that you can get a little bit messier in because it's a more shop-like maker space. It's not located in a library. That having been said, getting back to the earlier discussion about climate and culture and inclusiveness, we have actually had student employees come to our maker space and seek employment saying that they used to work in the engineering maker space, but they actually wanted to come work in our maker space because they like the way that it feels and that they feel very strongly about creating inclusive environments. We've actually had some students say, I like working here because you're committed to inclusivity. And I was shocked to hear those comments from our students and also very happy. So our current gender breakdown, again, thrilled with this. I would also like to note that to my knowledge, as of right now, male and female are the only gender options for students at UT in the sort of student management information systems. So that's why we stick with this binary. So where are we heading in the future? The next step for us, you know, we feel that at this point through all of this data, we are starting to develop a more comprehensive picture of what our patron expectations are, of the ways in which they are using our space, and also about how they feel about our space. But now we would like to start to really close the loop on some of these data sources. The assumption that we are working from right now is that pretty much every student that is interested in using our maker space or that is using it is also a member of our Canvas course. There are ways that students could get around that, but it's actually very difficult. So let's say we've got close to a thousand students in the Canvas course. What we now need to determine is of those students, which students are actually taking more substantive actions and getting certified to do stuff. And that's where that Qualtrics digital sign off comes into play, because that gives us action data. So we can then correlate those two pieces and see, okay, of those interested, which are actually engaging, and of those that are engaging, where are those students coming from and what level are they at? So if you are interested in learning more about the equipment in our space, that information is available on the last slide. And before I take questions, I just want to acknowledge Crystal Wyatt-Baxter. She's the head of assessment at the University of Texas Libraries, and she's been a key partner in this process. So I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you so much.