 Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to today's webcast, Live Value, Value of Comment Spaces. All lines have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions and comments following the presentation. If you'd like to ask a question during a webcast, you may do so by clicking on the chat box. Sorry, by using the Ask a Question button, look it at the bottom of the slide. Simply click that button and hit the Send button. This time, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to Martha Kiedelidu. Ma'am, the floor is yours. Thank you. Welcome. I'm Martha Kiedelidu, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the second of six webcasts on our Live Value IMLS grant. Today's webcast is on the value of common spaces, and a couple of logistical things, as you heard everyone, will be muted to cut down on background noise. We do welcome questions. Please type your questions, and we stand ready to answer all of them. And questions and answers that we do not address as well as the ones we addressed during the webcast will be distributed to attendees after the webcast along with the recording that will be available on YouTube. So I'd like to take a minute to briefly mention the people that are here with me today in today's webcast. Steve Smith, Dean of Libraries at the University of Tennessee and Gail Baker, electronic resources coordinator at the University of Tennessee and Teresa Walker, Head of Learning and Engagement at the University of Tennessee. And our goals are to become familiar with the Live Value Project and more specifically with the aspects of it that refer to the common evaluation. And we want to do that by addressing the following three goals. We want to have an understanding of the shift towards outcomes-based evaluation in higher education and libraries, and Steve Smith will speak to that. We'll explore what it takes to get the necessary data to convey to campus administrators the value of the information commons and Gail will tell us a bit more about how to get the right data. And then Teresa will talk about making connections between the data and user outcomes and the value derived from the use of the commons. Again, this is the second of a number of Live Value webcasts and the Live Value work is an IMLS grant that was given to the University of Tennessee and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Carl Tannopier and Paula Kaufman respectively as the co-PI is there. And ARL is a key partner in that grant together with the University of Syracuse and we've also had projects from the UK involved in this line of work. For ARL, Live Value is a continuation of the work we have done in the stats qual arena. We've tried to bring both quantitative and qualitative data to serve the needs of libraries historically with the ARL statistics more recently with the live qual protocol that focuses on the needs of users. We've also developed the climate qual protocol that focuses on the internal organizational climate and we've done work at ARND in the digital library and electronic resources area. So focusing on outcomes-based assessment is a natural outgrowth of some of our earlier work on quantitative and qualitative methods but with a strong emphasis on the accountability calls that we hear these days very strong especially not about higher education and libraries as a consequence. And Steve Smith, we will tell us a little bit more about those pressures in higher education. Steve? Sure, thank you and as Martha said I'm going to talk a little bit more about the backdrop, the changing landscape of higher education as it relates to outcome and assessment and specifically a little bit about the picture here at the University of Tennessee. So one thing that changed the world for us here in Tennessee is that in 2009 the governor at that time who was a Democrat but our current governor who is a Republican has continued this emphasis, challenged the University of Tennessee at Knoxville to become a top 25 public research university. The very next year the legislature implemented something called the Complete College Act which its ultimate goal is to raise the average number of Tennesseans with undergraduate degrees which is about 25% I think or was in 2010 to something closer to the national average which is about 30%. So along with and as a part of these changes the state of Tennessee was the first state in the union to basically move the assignment of almost all of its higher education dollars to an outcomes based model. In making this change the university drew up a new strategic plan which is highlighted on the next slide. And that plan isn't very different than the plans that you see at a lot of other universities that emphasizes undergraduate education and graduate education with an emphasis in enhancing the diversity and the quality of those student populations. It also emphasizes support for research and creative activity. Another emphasis is the recruitment and retention of high quality faculty and staff and finally better support for infrastructure and resources. So with a backdrop of the various changes that I've talked about the new strategic plan the state moved to outcomes based budgeting model. We've moved away from a world in which basically our budget was determined by counting the number of students in seats on a certain date in the semester. And I'll talk a little bit more about a little later about some of the more specific changes that's resulted in. So the library to support these efforts drew up a new strategic plan. Every part of our strategic plan which has five emphasis supports the new strategic plan. One which we've called out here is our desire to be the 24-hour intellectual and social hub for the campus. We feel that that speaks directly to especially the student metrics that are important to our new budgeting process. Also in our new strategic plan if you look more closely I think it shows a little better on the next slide. Beneath each of the headings for the five areas we explicitly tie that area to one of the vol vision imperatives. One of the points of the university strategic plan. So our faculty, staff, our administration can look at the strategic plan and see at least how we feel that connects to the university strategic plan. So against this larger backdrop it's mean that some things have changed significantly. And one of those is how we go about arguing for a new budget. It used to be in the old world that often times you'd make a budget argument sort of like trying to find the price of your house. You'd go out and look for comparable. We would say X university is like us so we should have a budget very much like theirs. I spent most of my career in South Carolina and a lot more in the state of Texas before coming to Tennessee. So another thing that another time honored budget trick is to stoke rivalries. In South Carolina we had Clemson to beat up on it. In Texas I was at Texas A&M so we always looked for the University of Texas and would often make budget arguments based on something that they're doing and our need to be better than them. The other thing that I think we used to use and maybe still do, many places still do, I still think about it the inflation factor. I've always been a little bit uncomfortable with that argument though. I don't think it's ever been a particularly good way to enhance the budget or honest way to try to scare our upper administration with scary inflation. So that's a little bit about how the world has changed. In the new paradigm, those emphasis of the strategic plan is to be very candid about it. The things that we look at the most, the things that the university looks at the most are measures of success that relate directly to student success, metrics around recruitment, metrics around improving the diversity of the campus, metrics around first year retention rates, metrics around graduation, four and six year graduation rates, as well as out placement. What sort of jobs are people getting? There are, we do care and report metrics about the generation of research dollars, but the emphasis by and large has been on success outcomes that emphasize student success. So for me in my world, the emphasis on return on investment and live value comes in on a moment too soon, as I engage with our administration on how the library is helping the university administration reach those larger goals. It's very helpful to be able to reach out and look at some of the things that we're beginning to produce as a result of the live value project that speak directly to those areas and how those are going to impact the larger budget picture for the university. I'll also say though that I'm fortunate to have not only a very good campus leadership but enlightened. They want metrics, they want data, but they also still respond to good stories as well, data with life. But the data is becoming increasingly important. Thank you Steve for giving us this compelling background context. We do have actually a related poll question that we are going to right now pose to our audience. And as our audience takes its time to click an answer, I'm going to read it. It's asking whether your institution is operating under an outcomes-based budget. For example, are you expected to demonstrate the library's contribution to student retention, progress to graduation, out placement and student outcomes like these? And you can provide your answer, yes, no, or not sure. We're going to take just a little bit more before I'm going to stop the question and show the results to you. We have actually the majority of the institutions saying no at this point, 65%. I can preview the results, I'm going to stop it, I'm going to show the results so you can all see it. 65% said no, they are not there yet on an outcomes-based budget yet. But 11% said yes, and 22% said not sure. Steve, how was it at Texas and South Carolina? Well, Texas is a much more recent experience, so I can speak to that more meaningfully. We weren't really under the outcomes-based budget model there. We were very much in that mindset because the Texas A&M, well over 90% of our budget was derived from student fees. And our only instrument for increasing our budget every year or every two years was to demonstrate to the students return on their investment. And of course, with Texas A&M's contribution to live quality and all that, that was always in the air there. That was always a big part of what we did. But there wasn't sort of the same mandate from above that we have at Tennessee at the moment. I don't know how things have changed in Texas since I left two years ago. We are hearing clearly that they've moved towards outcomes-based assessment. So as you are in this new environment at the University of Tennessee, let's see how, and hear from Gail, how you go about updating the data you need to demonstrate value. Gail? Hello. My name is Gail Baker and I am the Electronic Research Sources Coordinator at the University of Tennessee Libraries. Today I'd like to talk about getting the data that we felt was needed for this live value study to determine the value of our common spaces. At the John C. Hodges Library, could you move next slide please? At the John C. Hodges Library at the University of Tennessee, the commons is a community of services, resources, and service-oriented people. It's the learning commons taking into consideration different styles of learning, providing technology and associated report support, facilitating group work with spaces, furniture, and technology, not only for student group study, but also for consultation with instructors and tutors. It provides services like the Writing Center, Stat Lab, Consulting, Student Success, Center Tutoring, etc., all student-centered, by the way. Okay. In this study, we're going to look at how we define success, pulling together available data, gathering new info, and making meaningful connections. Now looking at the current data that exists, we've got some that's automatically created. Log file analysis of software used, commons on the commons workstations, equipment checkout, and so on. Could you move ahead at one slide please? I'm sorry. Thank you. Let's see. Data collected in person by service providers like sign-in sheets, transaction counts, ticketing system data. Demographic information on retention is available to us in summary form, but we don't have the detail access to the detail information. Student access surveys that the university has for students who leave the university. Of course, live call. We have been taking probably about every other year for the last few years. The National Survey for Student Engagement and our UT Factbook that has statistics, various statistics about the campus. Now, the data that we felt we needed, if you could go to the next slide, thanks. Student reported data on how they use the commons and student reported value of commons services and spaces. We felt we could get through a survey and we wanted to be able to link that to student records data, showing how well a student is progressing towards their degree like GPA and credit hours for a certain semester. And we wanted to also have demographic data like from the admissions systems, high school GPA, ACT scores. Where did they come from? What state did they come from? That sort of thing. So I'm going to let you take control again, Martha. I think there's a poll coming up here. Yes, we do have a poll and I'm going to pose the question to the audience right now. And the poll reads, which type of data do you believe is most difficult to obtain at your institution? And the choices are demographic data, progress toward degree data, all of the above, and a fourth choice, not sure. And we're going to give a couple more minutes to the audience to respond. And I'm going to stop the questions right now and click on Show the Results. And what we have is 72% of the people said the data regarding progress towards degree are the hardest to obtain. And 18% of the next category, 8, said all of the above. Gail, I'm going to move on to the next slide where you can tell us about creating a new data set. Okay, let's look at the right hand column first. Progress towards degree data is mainly data that I would consider would be with the old registrar days. I used to work for graduate school at one of the Big Ten universities and worked with student records data. So if I talk about register, I'm going back retro. But data such as cumulative GPA, credit hours, class standing are basically are very useful for looking at progress towards degree. On the left hand side are some admissions data that you can get from the admissions system that provides some demographics. We've got birth date, sex, ethnicity, years started at UT, ACT, SAT or equivalent, GPA, transfer students, and so on. We spoke with the people at our office of institutional research and assessment about pulling this data together and matching it with the results of our survey, with individual results of students in our survey. This office routinely pulls together data like this and crunches it and makes it available for the university to answer surveys and inquiries from university officials. I'll talk a little bit later about how we were able to get this done, but let's move on to the next slide, please, and the surveys. We've created two surveys. One was this in-person survey where we focused on services used on a specific visit. We ran this for a week in summer of 2011 and a week in fall of 2011 and we had over 900 respondents, which we were very pleased with. The in-class survey was made available to students in a couple of large general education classes. Communication studies 210, which is public speaking, and 240, which is professional and business communication. We focused on the spring 2012 classes. It was administered via a participant management system called SONA, S-O-N-A. Students in these classes have to participate in several research studies during the term and our survey, in-class survey, was one of those that were available. We had 146 people responding, which is about 20% of all of the students registered for those classes that term. This survey contained detailed UC questions with information on time spent on activities. It also included a session on student feelings and perceptions about the value of the commons towards their success at the university. In order to link survey responses to student data, we had to consider human subjects compliance and worked with our library review board and the institutional review board to make sure that we were in compliance with state and federal regulations. We also, when we turned in our proposals, obtained emails of support from the communication studies course coordinator and the assistant director of the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. In order to protect our subjects, we had a statement of rights and project description, which was in the SONA system that students were to read before they decided to take the survey or opt out of it. Students were told they must be 18 or older because different rules apply to minors. We asked them to provide their university ID, and we call that the net ID, so that we could obtain their admissions data and other information for progress towards their degree. They didn't have to give us that ID, but 125 of the 145 students who responded did so. They were also told that the data would be on a protected server and that it would be confidential, and if we reported it, it would be reported anonymously or in summary. Now a little bit about survey administration. For the exit survey, we used signs in the library and we had a little incentive that you can see on the right, when a $50 credit card or gift card, excuse me, and that I think helped us with our responses. The survey was on one sheet with questions on both sides, and we had a separate sheet for the gift certificate drawing, so there was one box for the surveys and one for the results. What we did with the surveys was have one of our GA's on the grant entered the data into Survey Monkey, and that was helpful for us in analyzing it. The exit surveys were given one week during the summer term and the fall term. I said that the last time, or I said that previously, but we had it spread out so that we had a couple of hours in the morning, a couple of hours in the afternoon, and then a couple of hours in the evening to try to get a wide variety of users. We finally ended up getting a table and chairs for the students to sit down and fill out the survey more easily, and we'll probably use this again in the future. One of the interesting things we found in just looking at who participated in this exit survey was looking at pie charts of different class ranks, and we found a particularly large number of graduate students participated, and we did not expect that at all. So that was kind of gratifying, and maybe we can ask some of those students to focus maybe on graduate students in the future perhaps on some of our surveys about the commons. Administration of the in-class survey, I think I've mentioned that the courses were required. We use SONA to give the information about the survey and allow people to then, if they decided to go on, we link them to our survey and survey monkey. SONA also gave students credit for taking the survey. Let's see. Students provided their net IDs, which were then linked to a unique survey ID, and the Office of Research was given that list of net IDs with the associated survey IDs. When they returned the data, we just had that unique survey ID, so we didn't know who had the net ID of the person who had that demographic data or grade data. If you look at the participants we had at the end of fall 2012, we just got that data last week. We had 111 subjects remaining at the end of fall, so several of them that did provide their net ID were not back. Of those we had 82 of the 88 freshmen we had in the spring came back. But interestingly enough, we saw that at the end of fall 2012, 14 of those people who were freshmen in the spring still have credit hours that make them freshmen. They don't have enough to go up. We've had a problem of students taking 12 hours a semester and not 15, and those are the ones who may graduate later and all. But anyway, I digress, excuse me. Let's look a little bit at the responses here. If we looked at the next slide, we have just started doing some comparison with the UT Factbook data looking at entering freshmen cohorts for our 88 freshmen spring. They had average GPA of 3.87 and so did the whole fall 2011 cohort, the freshman cohort with them. So that was quite close. The average ACT of those survey freshmen was 25.57 and the average ACT was 26.7. So a little bit lower. Of the six students who did not return, one of the students who was out of the state studied most of their time in the dormitory. Their CUM GPA was greater than 3.0 at the end of the term, so I'm not sure why they did not come back because they seemed to have the grades, but it would be interesting to follow up if we could. But I thought that was interesting. Of the two who didn't return, one was from out of state, spent most of their time in the dorm. We had a lot of people who said they spent some time in the commons and found it useful, but this person did not. The other person who did not come back answered one question saying they used the commons a few times throughout the semester. They did not respond to any other questions. That person had an ACT score that was way below the average ACT and at the end of the spring term they had a CUM GPA of less than one point. So I think that person might have been an at-risk student upon admission, so that was very interesting too. We've still got a lot of more data to look at with those linkages, but Teresa has a lot more results too, and so I will pass this on to her then. Gail, before we go there, we have a few questions that have come through, and one is a clarification. Someone heard that you mentioned about student progress toward graduation, and this person said they heard class standing as something used. Did you mention class standing? Yes, because you can tell by cumulative hours, but they also did give me rank. Class rank was a data item that they automatically supplied even though I didn't have it, but I failed to mention that that was something I didn't ask for, but I received. You received the class standing? Yes, I thought I could deal with it by credit hours, but then you get into problems with people changing majors and all of that, so anyway. A couple more questions that relate to the privacy issues and how you manage the privacy issues with the data. You talked a little bit about that. This is a specific question that is coming from Nancy Adams at Penn State. She has run the FERPA question when trying to get institutional data. She has run into the FERPA question, and the answer she gets back is that she's not a university official with a legitimate interest in the data. Any advice on how to get around such a response? Well, this was a grant that was funded by IMLS, and the head of the grant for us was Dr. Carol Tenapier, who is well-known, I believe, to our institutional review board. So that may have helped us, but I think we probably could have, if I had had letters, let's say it was just me and Teresa, and we wanted to do this, we probably would have gone to someone, a faculty member who does a lot of research, especially in the social sciences, and may help support our request. Very good. I would also add, if I could, this is Teresa, that I think we might have laid some of that groundwork along the way just in terms of the partnerships that we've made on campus with our Student Success Center and other tutoring centers and areas like that that are quite supported by the Provost's Office, and I think that has helped show that we have a stake in this as well. Right. I think Teresa is a source of data for some of those offices, too. Yeah. So having good relationships, building on relationships, and I know you'll talk a little bit more about that, Teresa. One more question since we're at this, that's specific to the survey, kind of newer from Oklahoma State is wondering whether it would have worked to have the survey online so that you wouldn't have to enter the survey data manually? Do you think that would have worked? That was the exit survey. We thought about it, but I think we couldn't get all of the enough tablets together and decided it was easier. I think we would like to try an online survey in the future for the exit survey. I have a little bit of information about that, too. Now the in-class survey was online. That was online and that was automatically collected. But one of the things that happens on our campus is we have a little bit of survey overload, especially to students, and the campus struggles desperately to get anything near an 18% response rate. And we usually don't get anywhere near that, but we found that in-person surveys, especially ones that have drawings attached to them and you can sign up to win something, get much better response rates. And we did. We got almost a thousand respondents for that one. And before, in case Steve has anything to add to this question I'm going to read from you coming from Heather Gentron from UNC Chapel Hill. She's wondering if a library is part of a larger campus committee or other group that is working to identify what factors lead to student success. So are there any other bodies like that on campus and beyond? Well, I would ask Teresa and Gail to hop in here, too. But I don't believe there are in some informal, formal ways. We work with the Tennessee Teaching and Learning Center and with many other groups on campus on issues surrounding this. And probably, Teresa, you're probably a better place to answer that than I am. I guess there are two that I would mention. One is the UT Learning Consortium. And that is a group that has broad membership on campus, generally decision makers on campus or people who are involved with things like the commons. That's why I'm there. And we do talk about, we talk a lot about teaching and learning. We talk a lot about the spaces that go along with teaching and learning. And so that is one form we have for that. We're very lucky to have that on our campus. The other is our classroom upgrade committee, which looks at both formal and informal spaces. And we have representation on that committee as well. Right. And I think we should move to our next session. I know we have a poll question, and I'm going to move and push the poll to the audience. Let's see here. It's about the, I'm going to pose that question. And the question is how closely aligned is your library's strategic plan to your institution's strategic plan? We'll give a minute to people to respond. Okay. I see the responses are coming back. I'm going to stop the question. And what we have is 51% saying very much, 25% quite a bit, 9% some, 2% very little, and 11% not sure. So Teresa, that gives you a little bit of a sense of alignment of the library to the university. Okay. Thank you. And that's not surprising. I think that goes along with what we're seeing with kind of a shift toward outcomes-based decision-making. Okay. Well, as Dean Smith mentioned earlier, the library's strategic plan is very closely aligned with the priorities of the university here at UT. In our current environment, that means we're paying close attention to teaching and learning, the facilities and expertise to support it. It means that we develop strategic partnerships like the ones we mentioned, especially with people who support our goals. It also means we take advantage of our long-standing role as a provider of student life and academic support. And we provide leadership for campus there, too, and especially when it comes to informal learning environments. It also means we continue to invest our time and dollars in creativity into our campus's most loved informal learning space, which we think is our common. Okay. So this slide shows a snapshot of our in-class survey that basically asks to what extent is the library common a place that supports being part of the university? And libraries have always helped scholars to be scholars through the provision of information and other things. But I think increasingly we're being called upon to teach students how to be part of the scholarly environment. And I think at the same time, students have also been teaching us how to expand our notion of what a scholarly environment is. And the commons as an informal learning space is really a great example of that. So whether it's online and blended learning, flipped classroom models and things like that, our commons I think supports the evolving instructional mission of the university. And this slide shows students view the commons as that place, a place to get help, I guess, in all aspects of their academic life. Okay. So we'll move on to that next slide. And this just has a little bit more about increasing academic support and it shows more results. You can see 90% said the commons provides resources they need for class. 74% said that using the commons helps them do better in class. So you can see what the slide says there. One of my favorite things that we got is a student quote that was, I would be lagging behind as a student without the commons. That's the kind of thing I think that we really want to hear. And we did hear that as part of this. And on to the next slide. So I've mentioned that students have been educating us along the way on these spaces. On a practical note through this assessment, we learned that the students aren't kidding when they say they need more of everything. We kind of laugh when they say that, but through prior assessments such as focus groups, club calls, et cetera, we've heard that students wanted more individual space and they wanted more group space. And they wanted it sort of an equal amount, just more places to do everything. The next slide shows commons usage in class reported data. Our gate counts and logins tell us the students are here, but we want to find out what they're doing as well as what they felt the space was supporting. In the in class survey, students reported using the commons for both group and individual study on a regular basis and pretty much almost equally. The next slide shows what they believe about those spaces. And you can see that for all the categories listed, they felt the commons provided kind of the same amount of space, whether it's group work, individual study, space or collaboration. And then the next slide comes from our in-person survey, the exit survey that Gail was talking about. And we asked a similar question and got similar results. We've succeeded I think in creating a space that supports individual and group study within the same environment. And we learned that we have no reason to question the students when they tell us they need more of everything. The next slide shows a little bit more about the equipment and technology usage. For the in-person survey, students reported the amount of time they spent on certain kinds of activities, like using borrowed laptops, computer desktops, et cetera. This type of information is valuable at the campus level in decision making, decisions about computer labs, do we need them, how many do we need. Also, should we require students to bring laptops? We were surprised to see the number of seniors and grad students again that were making use of our technology offerings. Now moving on to some of the bits I'm very proud of, we have recently renovated our commons. And these pictures reflect some of the spaces that we've changed to fit student expectations, as well as campus directions in teaching and learning. This next slide shows a landing place, which is a term that we've kind of laughed about. It's a place to land when one comes through the front door. It's a great place to stop and figure out what to do next. So this type of space is oddly important, we found, because it helps students get their bearings when they come in the building. They don't have to stand around feeling lost or feeling funny about standing there ruffling through their bags and things like that. And so that's a space we were very careful to include in our planning. The next one is a group study space. And I have so many iterations of this picture since the first version of our commons in 2005. Group study, in many cases, is more about individual study that occurs in a group setting. And they're all sitting here ignoring each other very happily, socially together. And then, I guess conversely, our next slide, which is really about individual study, shows that it's really more about sitting down and doing the work. It has less to do with the number of people participating and more to do with putting a pencil to the paper. Okay, and then we have this next slide on individual study. See, we need to go back a couple, I think. I'll just keep going with this. Another thing about individual study is also well-facilitated in group rooms. And thankfully, we have a variety of group room sizes. The next slide is a picture of one of our new group rooms. And we put those around the perimeter. They have glass walls to allow a lot to come into the main commons area through the windows. The glass windows also give the students some privacy while still showing the buzz of activity and energy in the commons. The next one is a collaborative space. This is my favorite kind of collaborative space. The student-created space, and it usually has tons of furniture surrounded by, you know, whiteboards and a lot of people crammed into one little space. And then the next one is the media scape. And media scapes are a collaborative furniture that allow kind of easy collaborative work to show what's on different student laptop monitors. They're also great places for plugging in. And we're kind of watching to see how students use those. Okay, now on to the next slide. We've seen what has worked for the students. So what about what works for the university's mission? To go back to the university definition of student success, we've been about student retention and graduation rates. For well over a decade, UT's retention rate was right between 75% and 80%. And that was well below our parent's institutions. Our Student Success Center has been conducting, still does conduct, student exit surveys to determine why students leave UT. And we found that the top three reasons were that UT was too large and impersonal. They had trouble adjusting personally to it, or they didn't feel like they were part of it. I think we've always believed in the libraries that the commons is a space that kind of uniquely addresses some of these issues. Because it's a very student-centered space designed with convenient services, students in mind. We also have lots of resources for class and also just for student life in general. And so we were very pleased to go to this slide on student engagement, where we find out to what extent does the commons make you feel more involved in the university. And over 70% said that the commons makes them feel more involved. And that's an overwhelming percentage also that said that it promoted learning and helped them do better in class. So we were very happy to see these results. The next slide, I guess, we'll fast forward a few years. And retention rates have improved at UT, but they're a constant battle really. And our retention focus has turned somewhat to graduation rates. Toward this goal, the university strategy is about engagement in the university community and assimilation into the scholarly community. And again, the commons environment is kind of uniquely situated to provide students with the tools for success in a non-intimidating environment. Most commons environments have a combination of academic support, research assistance, media production, technology, tutoring, all those sorts of things. Our next slide sort of speaks to the acclamation to that scholarly community. It represents a combination of our survey data paired with progress toward degree data for the individual students. And it shows that students with a GPA greater than 3.5 make more use of research assistance, computer support, and just somewhat lesser degree tutoring services than other students who took the survey. So I think every librarian should probably rejoice in the computer support folks as well to see that students who are making the most use of these services are doing better in school. The next slide is sort of the opposite. It shows that students with a GPA lower than 3.5, and we've broken this out a little more since then, make less use of research assistance and computer support than the top students. In other words, students who know how to and regularly use the tools of scholarship research and computing resources do better academically. It remains to be seen if these students get into their major program sooner or if they graduate more quickly, but we will obviously, we were delighted with these results and the role that the common seems to play in acculturation to the university, and we're going to follow these students even more. Okay, and then the next slide shows some of our advocates. And this is a slide that made me very happy. With a clear picture of student university expectations, it's the teaching faculty who revisit the pedagogy and curriculum and retool to meet the new demands. And the commons as a learning environment supports knowledge creation. It's become a very valuable resource for faculty. And our survey, 80% of students reported that their instructors tell them to use the commons. The students have always thought to the commons, but as professors started buying into the idea of the commons as a learning environment, this transformation from information commons to learning commons really happened for us. We've long known that our commons was well regarded on campus, but more and more instructors are incorporating this space into the learning process. And that's formally and informally. Okay, and then moving on to the outcomes. And you can see some of those there. Some of the outcomes have been that we can, our administration can use this data for given figuring and renovating repurposing spaces. Campus administrators consult with us on technology and learning space needs for campus. I think our associate dean, Rita Smith, could probably be an architect at this point. I'm almost positive. I feel like I could probably do a lot with that myself. It's amazing the expertise that you gain with just configuring spaces for students in projects like these. Also library facilities and services serve as a model for campus informal learning spaces. And there's a greater visibility of the library's role in teaching and learning. We're being included in conversations that we haven't been included in in the past. And that's been gratifying and it's also helped us to be better at what we do. Doing a survey like this is also, it's also going to have an unexpected marketing and public relations component. A lot of the students who took the survey reported that they learned more about what we offer because of the survey. So I guess the most valuable thing I've learned from this project is how truly connected we are to the students. The common spaces are teaching and learning environments for us as we interact with the students. And these spaces give us an audience with one of our most, if not our most important stakeholders. And that's what I have today. Thank you, Teresa. There are a couple of questions coming in. Okay. Have you collected any usage data on your media escape tables? Those haven't been here very long. Those have, they arrived just this semester. And we haven't started doing that yet. What we have noticed is it seems that, and this is really by observation. So I may be insulting a few students. The older students, the seniors and the graduate students tend to use them for collaborative work. And I see this more in the evening than in the daytime. In the daytime I think people come in and out fairly quickly. And students who appear to be younger, the undergraduate students with their hats on backwards and chewing their gum, they are using it as a place to plug in their laptops, plug in their phones and things like that because there are six plugs on those tables. So that's what we're seeing. And again, one of the questions inspired from one of your pictures, the group rooms picture. Michael Maciel from 610M says, I really like the idea of the sliding glass doors for the group rooms. But wonder how well they hold up. Has that been a concern for you or are they standing up to constant use? So far they're standing up. And we're wondering the same thing. I think so far they're standing up. They're standing up a little bit better than I thought they might. And because their commons gets a lot of use. One thing I have noticed is that they're being used for whiteboards. And so that's just something you have to be okay with, I think. Thank you. There is one more. Let me see, do students reserve space or just walk in? Right now we have a combination. We have two rooms, a practice presentation room, which is kind of a larger room with a lot of technology. And also a smaller group room that's just really one of the study rooms with a little bit of technology. And both of those can be reserved. But our hope is to allow all of those rooms to be reserved very soon. That's not something our project went a little bit longer than we thought it would. And so we're kind of a little bit slower on getting to the room reservation piece. But we hope to be able to do that for all rooms. Very good. And we did have, I believe that earlier question came before you showed some of your results. But it's worth, I think, emphasizing the answer to this question. Where the results on how helpful the commons was crossed out with actual student performance based on the ID. And you showed a little bit of that, but can you just emphasize again how you see that? Yes, what we did was we took the results from the survey, whether it was reported usage. In some cases the reported usage a bit is easier to compare if students say they're using research assistants in the commons this much and they're also making above 3.5. That's the data that's time-consuming but easy enough to pull together and put together. It's a little bit harder in the belief section, but that is something we're doing as well. We're going through and seeing for students who believe that the commons helps them do better in class. We're trying to find out are they really doing better compared to people who didn't believe that or what are the trends there. And we're still going through tons of data. It's a lot because we started with the data we were automatically collecting. Then we had basically three surveys and then also pairing that with this demographic and progress toward degree data that's coming from campus. So getting all that data into one place was kind of our first step and we're still looking into that and hope to get some results out soon. We're getting close to our closing time, but there is one more question that's very interesting. Can you speak a little bit about specific programming? What are you offering besides reference and answering computing questions and offering space to the writing center? Give us a two-minute answer to that. Okay. Yeah, one of the latest additions to our service offerings that came along with this renovation is that our Student Success Center offers tutoring and referral for counseling and all kinds of things to students. Their primary operation is in the commons. We also have the Math Tutorial Center, which is heavily used, heavily requested. The Stat 201 Lab, heavily used, and the Writing Center, which is of course one of the most important parts, I think, of the university. And so they're all here working with us and we have many other groups as well. Thank you. Well, I just want to remind all the people that we capture some of the ways space is perceived through the library space dimension in life called, it has three elements, space as utilitarian. As a utilitarian concept, the space is a symbol and the space is refuge. But also worth mentioning there are a number of studies in the literature on how people use space. I've highlighted here on the slide the five articles that were published in the 2010 Library Assessment Conference Proceedings. They are available freely on the Web. Georgia Tech, Bob Fox and Amit Doshi wrote a paper there and work from SUNY Buffalo and Drexel and the University of Virginia and Washington State University in Vancouver is also featured there. I do want to mention that there is interest in the LibValue project for expanding these methodologies to additional institutions. So if you want to join a pilot in the coming year, please let us know all our names and emails are on this slide. And we hope to see many of you for our April 18 webcast on books and e-books. Thank you very much for attending today's webcast. Have a great day. To conclude today's webcast, we thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines and have a great day.