 Welcome back everybody and thanks for joining us for this final set of presentations for the last day of the spring 2022 CNI member meetings virtual event. We have two project briefings and then an invited. An invited presentation. We will close the session with a couple of brief reflections from a folks on some of the more interesting or exciting things that they've heard today. So with that, and without any further ado, I'm going to welcome. Welcome Christopher Gilman and Elizabeth Macaulay from the UCLA library. They are going to talk to us about ways to integrate digital collections use into the curriculum I think you will find some interesting echoes here to some other work that you've heard described at recent CNI meetings including this one. And thank you for joining us. Christopher and Elizabeth, I'll turn it over to you. Hi everyone, thank you Cliff. I'm Elizabeth Macaulay I'm head of the digital library program at the UCLA library the University of California Los Angeles. And I am here with my colleague Christopher Gilman I'll let him introduce himself. Hi Christopher Gilman digital curriculum program coordinator with the digital library program is UCLA. Chris, can you go to the next slide please. So I'm just going to give a little bit of context for the presentation that we're going to that Chris is going to give on his, his work and their accomplishments but sort of like what was the framing and how was this commissioned is is what I'd like to set out here so the UCLA digital library program has been around for about 15 years. It started before it was named it with some digital collections and we are currently a fairly large program there we manage about 280 collections and growing and we have numerous sort of named collecting programs and collection building programs as well as just standard activities that we do to make more digital collections available. Currently in those 280 collections there's about 3.4 million items. And this is just a snapshot from our front page. Chris next slide please. Well it's there somewhere. When it comes up it'll come up there we go. So what the foundation is for the work in connecting to the curriculum is that we really need to have rich digital collections that are unique. Or we tend to emphasize unique sometimes they're unique sometimes they're rare and maybe uniquely available openly or in a digital form. I put a lot of emphasis in the program on on building those collections and making them voluminous so that they become research level collections. But then an equally important foundation is that these materials when they are digital that they be interoperable and I sort of split that word out to highlight it a little bit more. I remember learning this when I was in graduate school that word was hard to to figure out and then once I figured out what it meant or I had command of the definition it was in my active vocabulary I used it a lot. And it is part of our foundation but what it means is is still important that across platforms are in an interway we make things so that they can be operated on and that's what Chris is going to highlight in this presentation. So we had to have a foundation or a technology solution that allowed for that. And then what I want these collections to be or what we're trying to achieve at UCLA is that these these collections are operational not just in situ like inside their interface that that my program works to create. But that they're also transferable and useful and operable exit to you which I think, you know, we'll see in this presentation a little bit more. So we want to get out of the interface and what I really want to do is see us get into the classroom because our motivation is not just to build it and and let it sit there and be indexed by Google but the real purpose of our, our organization the digital library program and more writ large the UCLA library is to connect with students and researchers and and make a difference in how they learn how they produce knowledge and how they develop in in creative and artistic fashion as well. So our collections can be useful in creative works. Christopher has been passed with looking at our collections and looking at our campus at UCLA and building a bridge outward from these digital collections which might be currently or could be conceived as inert and making them active. And so that's what I'm going to pass the mic over to him to talk about these things and what I guess to highlight here what are the goals. I'd like to say that we have hypotheses. And that's how we work in the digital library program at UCLA. If we have more collections we might have more users. If we activate these digital collections, they might get used more in classrooms and then we take action and then we evaluate so these are our hypotheses that that through the work that we're doing with connecting to students and curriculum, we can make a bigger impact on our campus. And I will turn it over to Christopher for real. Great. So, so I'll give you a quick overview. I'll try to move quickly through material. And I've also used the visual registers as much as possible. So you get a sense for what we're doing, even if some of the words have to be hurried. So we're going to talk in three parts, talk about canvas itself as a medium. So in this sense canvas is a learning management system, not to be confused with canvas on a triple I F viewer. Showcase our custom three unit template that we developed. That's the frame that that we refer to in the title and give you some some information about our experience this winter deploying it for the first time and then and then give some summary feedback from the student experience with this with this project. So first about canvas as a medium. So, we embarked on this project as part of a wholesale shift at UCLA from a Moodle based learning management system to to canvas and the comments that I'm making today. Presuppose that canvas is necessarily what one should use at any institution as a learning management system but rather the learning management system itself is a is an excellent medium for managing and negotiating student learning with digital collections in the classroom. The fact that we are transitioning meant that the entire university is suddenly thinking about learning management as well as innovative innovation in teaching and learning. So, just for inspiration. I'm pulling from this alias is famous anatomy, in part because I think that student learning is embodied, and also as a kind of visual metaphor for introducing our three unit template and related curriculum. So, the template itself is designed to integrate digital engagements through exploration of the collections analysis and public project work as essentially plugins into a standard university course. We created a kind of a graphic representation in the homepage with the main body of weekly topics. In our case, and quarters and 10 weeks, and then units devoted a pretty rigorously to materials methods and products in that sequence. So this is a relatively fixed sequence. We could of course, change it in the template these are all variable and implementation, but we found that this is a pretty helpful structure. So, what I just want to highlight something about sort of the affordances of a digital page structure in canvas, and that is the distinction between verbal communication and visual communication. In this case, let's think of verbal communication in a simple form of a rhyme, where two things that have very little to do with each other presumably suddenly find some sound symmetries between them a cat and a mat. And if you apply that to to visual content, you can see that there are also opportunities for essentially visual rhymes or juxtaposition of similar imagery that may come from very disparate sources. And in our case, as Lisa has essentially set us up to consider we we are active participants in the triple IF community and our and our collections are in triple IF, for the most part, and content in triple IF can be sourced and dropped into a viewer alongside a content drop from another source in this case, Library of Congress so we see the codex on me a tennis on the left, and the glads or gospels from our own collection on the on the right. In this, we have not only juxtaposition but we have the ability to deeply zoom and explore and and and change pages and so forth, and use the human eye as a tool for inquiry, and this really wouldn't be possible without these advanced digital technologies and systems. So, comparative analysis of details, as you start to see these items together is central to a process of of inquiry. With our learning management system, we can embed a viewer such as me's in this case, through very simple HTML directly into the canvas page and have students engage with it in their course context. So here is a sample page from a live course. And in so doing we essentially create a kind of longitudinal cascading effect where content can be pulled from our origin site into the learning management system through a sequence of activities, and then essentially taken outside into public viewing in a completely different context in this case, a student produced scalar project. Okay, so that was the sort of principle and now the actual experience, working with one professor chenling new zillion e, who is teaching simultaneously in the history department and Institute for society and genetics. So she used the, the template in two parallel courses that were highly symmetrical themselves, only one course derived its content from our collections. The collection of patent medicine trade cards on the left, and the Society and genetics course drew material from the UCLA or barium, all other respects are very similar. In each case, in, in her implementation, the course topics in the 10 week sequence covered principle themes that she would have taught in a previous course, irregular medicine history of pain and public health. I only know about those passingly now. In the materials she pulled in a collection of these extraordinary ephemeral objects patent medicine trade cards in for the methodology of the of the class students focused on comparative analysis and annotation and use group setting for collaborative evaluation of their students. And this is preparatory work for the otherwise relatively daunting technical and proficiency sort of skill sets needed for a scalar project. Okay, so here is an example of the sort of weekly rundown of the of the canvas site. For unit one. She and I worked very directly with Russell Johnson, the curator of these collections also worked both online and with digital with physical materials. And that focus allowed them to dig deep into the information literacies component, particularly the value of this information. Second, they focused on observation interpretation annotation as communication. And as you see on the right these, these activities this is just one of many activities in unit to where students did hands on digital work, and then we're assessed on their proficiencies. And in the third students focused on writing for the public visual rhetorics and took everything that they learned in the previous two units, and created a summative work product that could be assessed, both for content and for proficiencies. Okay, so how did the students like this. We had an extraordinary number of students who just simply said this was their favorite class, and I pulled in some quotations from comments that the students left with us. All around. It was just a great experience. There are all all cylinders firing scalar worked. The professor was great. Pat medicine trade cards are good. Great class. Another great class, and notably, the most memorable experience for me this quarter was the trip to the biomedical library and seeing, seeing these items in real life, and working with the with the curator. So that connection between the digital and the physical is really strong. And we think that this this approach can actually enhance the way students see physical materials. Okay, with the digital collections. We saw what we had hoped and what Lisa sort of set us up as a, as a goal. And that is students saw these things for the first time, many of them were upper division students. They were blown away by how many items they were looking at. And the quality and uniqueness and just general interest. And that they made their their way through four years, sometimes of an education, and had no idea that this, this, this treasure was sort of hidden under a bushel, and so forth. So on the three unit structure. What students largely said was that they did a lot of work but it was manageable because it was scaffolded and had frequent touch points with the professor. Anything they were confused about they had redundancy in the online instructor instructions and the professor filling in gaps or explaining things along the way. So, every item that the students learned was followed up in subsequent units, and they fit together in a kind of an integral whole students learn things that they that they hadn't anticipated before, and had great things to say about canvas itself as a tool. In addition, we intentionally structured in the ACRL information framework for informational literacy and a series of the particular frames and had students reflect upon the frames as they're moving through their learning and particularly we underscored information has value in the context of ephemeral items in the physical and digital collections. And the, the presentation by the curator Russell Johnson really kind of struck the students in where things are accessed that they had been originally discarded how they were collected and so forth. They just learned scalar quickly and effectively through this approach. Overwhelmingly, they liked the medium and they felt like the digital skills generally both with scalar and other things like HTML and linked media were things that they could apply in other contexts, both within and outside of the of the school. The particular affordances of the high quality triple I have content. And then we worked, both professors, the only and, and I worked with the students to consider what they would suggest for future iterations. We've already made some adjustments to our model but this is alive and iterative process, and essentially being adaptable to the, to the contingencies of the moment gave the professor a lot of positive feedback. So the, the, the bottom line for many courses comes in the course evaluations and having seen commentary we, we anticipated that they would be pretty good. And what we found is that in these two parallel running courses that there is a kind of a symmetry as well in the student responses, which suggests that the, that the model is itself a coherent and replicable from from one context to the next. The evaluations were high, and they were significantly higher than the same courses taught by professors early on in previous semesters so even if you account for her excellence as a as a professor. The big difference was in the course structure itself and the materials. The students interest in the subject matter increased significantly as a function of the course. And although the much was achieved in the course in the mastery. The difficulty was below average and the, and the workload was just about right. And this we have a couple of takeaways. One is that the LMS does effectively integrate collections into the curriculum that digital and physical collections work better together than they do separately. That structure such as the three unit template helps faculty innovate in the curriculum and manage the intensity of the work. And that students themselves learn valuable skills and really like the experience. So, with that, we can, we can wrap up I just wanted to point out that this is really part of a much larger soft collaboration with a variety of different people and, and sub institutions within the, the university, some of whom know they're contributing and some of them might not be all that aware. But our hope is that the work that we're doing has wide application and can be scaled up to a broad implementation. Thank you and we can take any questions. Thank you. This is really. These are, these are wonderful outcomes. It's great. It's great to see this. There are several comments and perhaps questions in the chat that you might want to have a quick look at. Meanwhile, folks, please share your questions either in the chat or just jump in. So I'm looking at the, at the chat from the bottom up outreach strategy and how many courses per quarter could you handle. That's a great question. I should. I should contextualize this a little to say that a parallel project underway is to create reusable modular content for sharing on our UCLA canvas commons and by that means to scale up the number of courses that can be supported. Right now we're, we're in a very intensive phase of trying out how the systems all work and what kind of responses we get from the, from the students. Generally, we're the, in terms of scale, because this, the three unit template presupposes buy in from the, from the outset by a faculty member. It's a, I'd say a small to large minority of courses that would be a maximum implementation. Not every, not every professor is, is interested in, in that, that kind of wholesale commitment to this, to this type of teaching and learning. On the other hand, it is intended for any type of course, and the numbers, in this case that two courses that we're looking at, where I'd say in the mid range of 60 to 80 students, and we've run parallel curriculum in courses as large as 300. So, the, the absolute number of students can be relatively high in this model. The number of courses is a, is another question. We won't know that I think until, until we've, we've taken this, I'd say another, another year of implementation. And as for the, the outreach strategy itself, it, it has been connected with the, what is called the LMS transformation effort at UCLA through networking and departments. And our, our various instructional support and research units such as digital humanities, hum tech, and, and others that have connections with faculty who are interested in willing to try out these kinds of these kinds of approaches. And with the center for advancement of teaching, which reaches the reaches the full campus. Let's see. I wonder if you played a role at all in assessment of student learning outcomes. That's from Tara Lynn Fulton. The, we have not done a formal assessment of the students. We did run a parallel project with the center for advancement of teachers, but I wouldn't be able to communicate that here. Tara Lynn scholarly primitives casting students is active scholars connecting established modes of inquiry with modern multi disciplinary methods. Excellent comment. The students are very engaged and empowered and particularly through the sequence of three units, many of them were not. They were particularly comfortable with the material that the methods or the technologies involved and by the end seemed quite confident and took charge of their own of their own project work. Right, any others. Well, looks like we're about ready to move on to the next presentation. Thank you so much for sharing that work. You've obviously really made an impression with it and it's really wonderful to see it so thank you so much for joining us and sharing that work.