 Well I guess we'll go and get started. Hey everyone, you're being recorded so don't shout obscenities. Last year a reputation be completely dispersed. I'm Eric Fererson. I'm the Senior Discovery Services Engineer with EBSCO. With me is Mike Wall, Systems Library at Louisiana State University Library. We're presenting today on course readings and learning management systems. So for learning management systems think Blackboard, Sakai, Desire to Learn, Canvas, Moodle, that kind of thing. So with that I'm going to turn it over to Mike who will go ahead and get started here. All right. Yeah I'm the Systems Librarian at LSU. Just real quickly what a discovery layer is. I'm sure a lot of people know what it is but I'll just briefly describe it. We have we're using EBSCO Discovery Service. We brand it as Discovery at LSU. And on our website we use it as the primary search. The main thing that it does is it allows people to search our catalog records at the same time as searching our database content, particularly the full-text content. So people can go into its search and go right to the full-text. And of course we're promoting our full-text a lot. What I'm going to do is I want to demonstrate real quick what our plug-in is going to do. So I'm going to switch over to see I'm going to have to exit the show and then come back to it. Oh and it's up. Okay good. Bear with us because we don't actually see this on our computer. So right now I'm going to Moodle at LSU. We use our LMS learning management system is Moodle which means that it's administrated by people at LSU but it's hosted off-site. So this is you know learning management software. You know it could be Blackboard and you talked about a couple of what those might be. So in order to create a reading list what we're going to try to do is create a reading list inside of Moodle. It connects to our Discovery profile so that people can search for items within Moodle basically and then they'd be able to create a reading list and then students can come over and just click on it and go right to the full-text. So I go to go to my course right here. Before Mike dives into the actual creation of the reading list this was intended to solve a common problem that I think all of us who have ever done liaison work with faculty members and that's getting library materials into the learning management system is not a trivial task. A lot of times there are two basic ways to do it. I can go into that. I'm sorry I forgot. Go back to the slide and I'll try to bring PowerPoint back up. Okay so yeah so in the best case scenario I guess he was to say is that what are the steps needed to create a list without this tool basically. So the instructor would have to go to the Discovery layer which we brand as Discovery, find the material, do their search, type it in, do the search, find the search. That's just the beginning. Then they would have to view the full record and there's a link all on the right side where somebody would click to find the permalink because if they just copy the what's in the address bar of the browser there's no guarantee that that link is going to work a little bit later because it's session dependent. So they have to copy the permalink then it's on the clipboard switch their browser over pay put go to back to the Moodle back to the LMS at this point that hopefully they've already created a little section that they're going to create their links reading list in and then they would have to paste it in there and then hope that the student got there. So that's the best case scenario. The less than optimal scenario is that the instructor might send the article whatever article they want off to the coffee shop and then students have to pay for it. Well if the library is already paid for it then that's not really an optimal scenario right there because the students in the library are both paying for it. The instructor might also upload their personal copy to the LMS. That's not optimal either because we don't know how the instructor got the material the full text we don't know if it's licensed. There's a fair use is enters a gray area whenever things are used over and over and over over time. So the best best case there would be if if you grab the material from license resources which the library would have. So now let me go now with all that let's see what we can do with the reading list tool. So I've got some samples already up here and I want to scroll down. Well I guess I can see what I want to do is edit my course. How can I scroll down over here. Maybe I want to click there. So I'm going to add the activity. Bear with me. OK. And then it's going to be an external tool. We're using something called the LTI protocol to communicate. For most faculty members they're going to be used to this kind of process because they've added syllabi to their courses. They've added assignments to the courses discussion boards to the courses. This is the same link that they would use to do those things except the option they choose for a library reading list is now this external tool business. All right. So we'll give it a we'll give it a name. You know readings. Was that for week eight. Here we have it configured this which which external tool are we using. We're going to use the LSU libraries and then we'll save it and that's all they have to do right there. So our block we got blocked but we'll click through the browser normally would just pop up and go right to the screen. And here this is where somebody would do a search. So I'm going to try to type in front of people and not be successful. So we'll look for we'll look for things written by Clifford Lynch. And we've got some things right here in the in the first screen here. This one looks like a good one lecture impact of digital scholarship on research libraries. If I want to this one has full text right here. So if I want to add it to my reading list I just click on it. It switches the button switches over to remove from reading list. Let's add a couple things. I'll add two of them. There we go. So those have been added to the reading list. So I'm still in Moodle. This is this emulates the interface of the Discovery service. It's not exactly the same. The style is a little bit different and some things but it's it's based on the API. So it's different but it's the same. I guess the best way I could say that. So now I want to go over to the current reading list. So I'm seeing this as the instructor remember. And then I can see the two things that are on the reading list. The two items right here. And did I choose the same thing? I think you did. Oh, it was two of the same thing. But so let me I want two different things. Yeah. There were two same things. This is the one I wanted. Let's try this one. Okay. Now remove that one. So I can click on it again and remove it. So now I got two different things here. One thing I can do is I can add notes to it. So something like this is required reading or you know, please read the section on digital libraries, something like that. I can change the order of them. Right there. So if I want this to be, well, that one to be first. And this one, let's say we want to make that second. Click here. It updates the order. I can also add URLs or web resources to it. So let's say I wanted to add, you know, some things from CNI, you know, or network information, right? Add that. Once it's there, I can also say, you know, something like visit this site and watch some videos, right? Because we like watching their videos. So and then save it basically. And it would be there. You can choose to right now as the default. It's a private reading list. But that means is that other instructors don't see it. But if you make it public, click here to make it public. It would be a public reading list. So that other instructors, let's say they're in different sections of the same course would be able to copy the list and bring it over. Or if you're, of course, the instructor could copy their own list. Let's look, if you were copying from another list, let's look at what we would do there. We would import from the exist from an existing list. We would see some of the lists here. Let's look at this one. So we view that list. And here we've got some things that are in this example list, just a sample. And we might choose which ones we want. Maybe we don't want all of them. But we have these Joyce Carol Oates sort of articles, even a web resource. Up here, we have options to include the notes themselves and to preserve the order that they're in. Whenever we do that, we can also check or uncheck them all. So we copy that over. And then everything from that list comes over to this list right here. And there they show up at the bottom with the notes since I copied the notes over. So that would be useful if we had a lot of sections of the same mark, same class. And then real quickly just show you what it might look like with a, let's see, I'm going to have to go back to here. Nope, here or here. Let's see. Just to show you what a, how a student would see it. So I'm going to switch my roll over to a student. So this is what the student sees. We just made readings for week eight. Oh, pop up blocked again. Yeah, you only have to set that once and then it's done. But we're on somebody. But this is what the student says sees is just the name of the article with the notes. And then they come here, you get the abstract or what it is. But then this is the Holy Grail right here is one click access to it. Because that LSU we use Sibilith, the students are used to logging in if they need to check their email, if they need to go to Moodle, they're already logged in. So whenever they go to this tool in Moodle, they've already authenticated. So if the instructor creates the reading list ahead of time, they just click on it and then they're there. And I think with that, I'll turn it over to Eric. So in some what this does, it eliminates the need for faculty members to struggle with permalinks, because unless you do that on a daily basis, like librarians deal with, it's not a trivial thing to find an appropriate permalink. This eliminates the need for that entirely. As Mike was adding different items to the reading list, it was actually just copying in the appropriate linking. So we're not actually making copies of the PDF and every time a student clicks on one of those full text links to jump out to the full text, it's registering as a full text use at the library system and accessing the library's licensed copy of that item. So not only does it kind of help us with copyright issues, because we're only linking to licensed copies of it, but it also helps us with collection development. So, you know, we were out at, I think it was St. Louis University here in town, and we were mentioning this tool and the collection development librarian actually spoke up and said, the thing that I get annoyed with when faculty members upload PDF documents to our learning management system is that it counts as one use the moment they downloaded the PDF, but then we never know about the 90 students that were actually using that article. Yesterday, during one of the assessment and evaluation presentations that was done, they mentioned on collecting the right statistic in order to determine what's important at the library. And they made mention that at Stanford, the most frequently circulated item was the Lord of the Rings DVD series. And if you make your judgment based on what's the most important thing at Stanford University libraries, based on that statistic, it would obviously be Frodo and Gandalf. However, what Chris Board suggested is what's really important are what are our students interacting with in this enterprise of teaching and learning. And this tool might actually provide you with a list of readings that students are using over the course of, you know, of working through class projects and that kind of thing. So this tool is built using an open protocol called the LTI protocol. It stands for Learning Tools Interoperability. How many of you have heard of LTI before? Okay, a couple of you, both from EPSCO actually. The LTI protocol, how many of you work for libraries on the library side of the house? Most of you, how about the IT side of the house? Okay. For the most part, LTI is more of an IT side of the house acronym. Mark is to libraries, LTI is to the IT side of the house. It's a protocol that allows libraries, universities, or even library vendors, anyone essentially to design websites that interact with learning management systems in interesting ways. So let's take our learning management system here on the left or CMS, course management system depending on the acronym you choose. Most course management systems have modules for like quizzes and for adding just links out to the web or creating folders or assignments or something like that. All of the major LMSs, I rattled off a list of five or six of them. We took a look at the, you know, the market shares of the variety of different learning management systems out there. About 95% of the LMSs that are out there on campuses in the United States have an LTI module in there. Now, all an LTI module is, is it's a link pointing to some other website, to some external website. So unlike a quiz or a folder or an assignment, which all stays in within the moodle or within the learning management system box, the LTI tool is just simply a link that points you to another website. But the nice thing about LTI and what makes it different from just a link out to another website is that that little blue line actually sends along quite a bit of information to our website, our reading list tool website that we can then use to create a very customized experience for the student. Part of that, I'm not going to read through all of these things, but part of that launch will send the user's full name and email address. And I hear privacy flags probably going up at this point. And we'll discuss that it actually can go over a secure system to where that's not actually, you know, it would be hard to ping into it as it's making that process. But over on a reading list tool, I'll note that we actually don't keep and store student information. We do store faculty names, so we can give faculty members the tool to be able to manage their own lists and things like that. But outside of that, we do not keep students names or email addresses and we never associate who's reading what. Although, I guess it really depends on who you're talking to, right? If you're talking with a librarian, chances are privacy is very high up on our values list. Whereas if you're, you know, if you're talking to an institutional researcher, you know, their day to day job involves working with this kind of sensitive data on a daily basis. So for them, they might take a different perspective to this kind of data. And on your campus, you may want to decide, since it's all in house and it's over secure channels, do we want to gather, you know, what, you know, do we want to say that, do we want to start profiling our students that this student is a heavy library user because they have clicked on more library materials than a Y type of student. But in addition to that information, that little click sends over what role the user is. So if I'm a student and I clicked on an LTI link, my reading list tool knows there are student coming in or a faculty member coming in, as well as which institution they're coming from, which course they're coming from, which list in the course they're coming from. And all of that allows my reading list tool to pull the right reading list and provide the right functionality. So when Mike clicked on it, when he was logged in as a course instructor, it gave him a search box. That's because it knew, okay, someone's coming in from LSU from this course, and they clicked this Joyce Carol Oates list that they want to work on. And because they're a faculty member, they get a search box. When he switched his role over to a student, they got that same list, but it noticed they're a student. So I'm just going to give them the list of readings to do. So that's what the LTI protocol allows you to do is to build fairly creative tools that can use knowledge of who the the incoming user is to design a fairly cohesive experience. I'm not going to dive into this too much, but on the back end, it really does involve a few different pieces. You've got the Moodle piece, where it takes about, I think, I think yesterday during one of the sessions, someone said, vendors are approaching faculty members directly and getting them to advocate for tools, and having them say it only takes 30 seconds of work on behalf of the Blackboard admin. Well, this actually only takes about 30 seconds of work on behalf of the Blackboard admin. The LTI tool setup itself is actually relatively low effort. However, your campus may have policies where they want to evaluate the tool, make sure it's not going to break, make sure it, you know, it adheres to privacy issues. So yeah, technically, it's a 30 second setup, but in reality, there's probably some hurdles that getting the tool approved in Blackboard may take. Once that's set up in Moodle, there are a couple of different approaches to getting this tool on your own campus. One is we do provide downloadable code for EDS customers on our EDS wiki. And you could have this up and running on your own local servers with your own local expertise managing it. That's the tool that that red box. And anytime someone clicks on a add to reading list, we store the title of that item as well as the appropriate link to that item in a local MySQL database. And that search just interacts with the EPSCO Discovery Service API to pull back the results. So faculty member types assumption that search box, it tosses that, you know, global climate change over into the EDS API, EDS API returned the results that they that they want. And that's when they start adding things to the list. However, we realize that not a lot of libraries really want to be managing their own applications like this. So come May 31st episode is actually going to be offering a hosted version of this tool, where the only part that needs to be done on your campus is this little bit right here in Moodle, the rest would be taken care of. Mike, you want to get ready to hit it. Right. So the implementation of this, it was a little unusual for us. This is before the hosted version is coming out next month, of course. So what we did is it's a it's a little unusual because there's at least three different people groups of people or servers involved. One is that the EDS reading list tool, the code and the sequel databases are located on library servers. So I was able to do that part of it. The API itself and then the discovery layer is hosted on EBSCO servers, of course. So when you do a whenever you perform a search, or if you're trying to access the full text, you're going to EDS or EBSCO right there. And then the Moodle part of it has to be administered by, in our case, the LSU IT department, which is outside of the library. They had to set up some, you know, the thing that where you go and add the list to the to the course. I like to say that my job as a systems librarian is to get these different systems to talk to each other. So this is an example of this. One thing I found is that, you know, to step back and take kind of a broader picture of this is that it allows the library to build relationships outside of the library. For one, for the students, it's that holy grail, the one click access to the full text. So if the instructor has gone through the trouble of building the, building the reading list, then the student just sees the reading list, they click on it. It could be midnight or 1 a.m. and the student just clicks on it and they can read their materials for the next day for class. So they're already authenticated because if they've gotten into Moodle, then they've gotten to, they've already authenticated for the discovery layer. The other thing it does is it allows the library to interact with the instructors. It gives them a tool to make their job easier because they want to set up their learning environment whether it's online or not. So this is a tool for them. Basically the library is going to where the people are. They're already on Moodle. They're in their learning management system. You know, it could be another system but they're there and the library is going out to them. You know, we hear a lot of talk these days about the, the library without walls or a library that's 24-7 sort of thing and as we're buying more electronic full text access to resources, we want to have an opportunity in a library to let this, let people use that stuff. So it's a chance for the library to promote its resources. And you know, whenever you talk about, when you start thinking about the university in total, I know it just drives university administrators crazy whenever they find out that students are paying for their articles in a packet whenever the library already has full text, unlimited full text access to the same articles online. So this allows the whole university to present a front to the students and faculty as a cohesive whole and the library becomes part of that. And we'll jump in here and say that one of our sites that have implemented this are actually a consortium that has an effort to do OER resources in learning management systems to reduce the cost of students as they take their courses, try to eliminate the high-priced textbooks that get added on top of all the things that the students have to pay for. They were already well on the way to having a program that they called a one-click, one-click class reads I think was the name of the program where they would curate lists of open educational resources that faculty members could easily tap into an learning management system and when they saw this tool this actually fit very well in line with that helping faculty members make use of materials that are not going to cost students extra dollars on top of what they're already doing. Right so when we implemented it I had to talk to the people at an IT department and you know the technical hurdles I mean we put it into a test environment you know we found out it worked the people the Moodle admins I'll say saw what it did and then we that was in fall of 2013 summer and fall of 2013 December of 2013 we put it live on the Moodle site and now we're in that kind of soft launch period where we got some instructors there are a few instructors that are using it right now and then we're going to come out with the guns of the Navarone as far as the publicity in the summer and and fall semesters and really push to to promote it put it on our website and go out there and really try to get some use out of it but one sort of side benefit or a meta effect that I found was that it allowed the library to interact with the IT department at LSU our funny story is that whenever Eric was actually doing a presentation online I put out an email blast all the library staff to say hey this is something that we're thinking about implementing come next semester you know you want to you probably want to watch it what I didn't realize is that that in that same email blast it was going out to the IT staff who are off who are off uh not in the library but anyway so I got an email back and they said uh are you thinking about putting a piece of software in the moodle because you realize that has to go through a committee and it has to be approved and I was like oh no you know oh yeah we're going to do all that kind of stuff you know it's not it you know we still have to do all that stuff it's technically it works but I had to explain some people who hadn't quite realized what it was yet and but once they saw it it was a it was a great project to work with them with because the the benefits were immediately obvious you know it's it's a tool that doesn't try to do a whole bunch of stuff it's basically taking you know our discovery service and you know putting it putting it where the people are um it's a you know the scope is limited but it does what it does effectively uh so it's a limited scope um but does it well and then um you know once they saw it it went to it went to the committee I didn't even know the committee was meeting nobody like called me and said hey you need to be here and you know they just kind of uh approved it and it went through and they said oh by the way this thing is approved you can go ahead and do it okay great you know I was already planning on it when's the meeting oh it was the last week so uh it went through and then um and then you know now now we're using it so uh it you know now I'm having like lunch with these people that I didn't know before who are like you know wondering why are you trying to put software and uh in our Moodle sort of thing just a couple months before I think one of the you know one of the things that this illustrates is how easy it is to get support for this type of application both within the library and within it departments because it makes everybody's product better so it makes the library's discovery system better in the sense that it makes these materials more available but it also made at least at LSU and the few other sites that we already have up and running with us it makes the LMS better the faculty member has perceived this as new functionality in my Moodle course that that makes my teaching easier to do and for that I think you know Mike's anecdote about the IT committee that oversees what gets put into Moodle and what doesn't get put into Moodle it being approved without even Mike's knowledge that it got approved is it kind of speaks to to what kind of impact that this tool has at our pilot site where you know we picked an EDS site that we knew was very close with EDS they were very friendly to us and we asked them to find some library champions within their college and they identified about 10 faculty members who they knew if this thing crashed and burned and bled mid semester that they wouldn't hate the library for it we found a pilot site that would do that with us as we experimented with this tool and what ended up happening at the end of this semester luckily nothing crashed and burned all worked as design but those 10 faculty members actually got together and wrote a letter to the provost to the provost saying what a great value add this was to their online teaching and learning experience and in turn the provost returned a letter to the director of the library saying you know you know keep up the good work this is the kind of thing that we want we want to see happen as we make further inroads into the online learning space so this kind of tool has the ability to make the library very visible in that teaching and learning experience not only this tool but that LTI protocol in general if that's where things are happening when it comes to teaching and learning on your campuses there are blended classes there are online classes there are MOOCs there are things happening in the digital realm on at your university the LTI protocol in all of those kinds of systems that provide those kind of learning experiences might provide a lot of new opportunities for library services the reading list tool is one example of them so I'm going to jump over to this other slide here I just want to give you another example of how the LTI protocol is being used before I joined EBSCO about a year and a half ago now I was head of library systems at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas that's where I learned about the LTI protocol and started getting interested in it but I didn't get a chance to build it until I came to work for EBSCO but I hired an assistant while I was working there and now he's kind of in my role there at St. Ed's and we've been going back and forth about what else can we do with this LTI protocol and he's built a very very lightweight redirecting application that essentially it takes that same batch of data that LTI launched data who they are what course they're coming from and then it redirects to their course guides and lib guides based on what course they're coming from so in this particular instance if there is a specific course guide for that class number it can redirect to that lib guide because you know the script says okay they're coming from political science 1306 that belongs at this lib guide so that's what we'll redirect students to if there's not one it fills over to well what discipline are they coming from oh they're coming from music I'll show them our music research guide here and if that fails there's no discipline research guide up there at all then it just fails over to the library's general general search box so it's these kind of nuanced connections into the learning management system that end up having a fairly powerful effect a very contextually relevant link without any additional work having to happen on a class by class basis so the reading list link you know Mike did some setup to install this tool at LSU but once the setup was done it was done for all the classes it's not like he has to go in and set up a new list here a new list here a new list here it's just a new tool the same with this once this is set up the once all faculty members need to do is add this you know add library research guides as their external tool and that link goes immediately to the correct lib guide so the LTI protocol provides a lot of opportunities for creating these kind of embedded experiences perfect you know I've got a couple of other ideas so I'm the developer of the reading list tool I got a chance to make it while I worked for EBSCO and it came out of conversations that we had as we you know as I traveled with the sales team to figure out well what are the the key things library users struggle with in interacting with library materials I mean EBSCO is a provider of a discovery system which is you know one step but that only gets you as far as the library webpage right you can embed a search box in the library webpage provide access to the bulk of your library's collection using a discovery system but not everybody goes to the library webpage so one of the things that we grappled with at one of these meetings was well let's consider the case of the faculty member how might they want to use library materials where might they want to use library materials where would it make the most sense to have library materials and more often than not it wasn't just on the library webpage it was in a course management system you know there are a variety of other places that people might need library resources and that's the kind of approach that we're starting to take with EDS is well where else can we plug EDS around the teaching and learning experience so some ideas is well one is like annotated bibliography assignment it's not uncommon for the first stage of a research project to involve an annotated bibliography assignment where they go out they do research they compile you know three to ten resources they annotate it they format it properly in MLA or APA citation style and they turn it in and that's their assignment this tool if you imagine it being flipped on its head where the students are the ones that are presented with the search box they're the ones adding things from the library's collection to their reading list and then annotating them and the faculty member ends up just seeing their students reading lists and can grade them right there within the system that's one of the next steps we're going to do with reading list tool is to flip it into a gradeable assignment called the annotated reading list tool there has been notion of course reserves what were your librarians saying when you about adding like print materials to the right whenever I started promoting them promoting this tool we did a couple courses not only in the library but also for faculty to start using it one thing that surprised me was that they wanted to use the reading list tool for things that weren't full text access because that's the thing I was thinking about was like you want that one click the student goes right to it they wanted a list of materials that people would have to come to the library to use and apparently there's not a tool already that does that or if there is they thought this was a little bit easier I mean we have course reserves sort of functionality in our ILS which I have to deal with a lot but they thought this might be an improvement over the course reserves sort of functionality that's in the ILS so that the student could just have a list of things that they need to read for this week or for the semester print it out and then walk to the library and then go right to the desk and then have the get the stuff that's on reserve right there so you know whenever we were started promoting this tool that's that was another way that we started reaching out to different parts of the of the university because you know it was it was something that was unexpected another unexpected thing was that people administrators and teachers from LSU online or the continuing education departments came over they have different instances of Moodle but I hadn't really thought about them whenever I was you know I was thinking about you know our the you know the traditional student bodies at this point but they're really interested in this part of it and we'll you know we'll start having a discussion about getting this online for them so that they're able because they're really interested in that full text access being able to go online you know 24-7 and reaching this material so there are three main takeaways that that I've seen happen on campuses that have installed this tool one is the building of relationship so you know Mike mentioned having you know it's very anecdotal I have lunch with the IT guys now where I never had that kind of connection before so it's informal relationships that I think spurred the innovation between two different departments so a project like this could be the thing that sparks these kind of collaborations across the different departments the statistics that you may be able to pull out of this reading list tool are quite interesting so one thing you could easily do right now is pull well what are the readings that have been added to reading list to get a list of titles and journals that are being used in your courses but you could also and again we're not collecting this now but if you wanted to get creative and push the boundaries of privacy I guess one thing you could do is start profiling you know all right students who access X number of readings on average over the course of the semester get a better GPA or tend to graduate there's a potential here for gathering that kind of data we obviously have straight away from it at this point because I don't think we've got the same perspective you know I've been out of out of the front line librarianship for about a year and a half now so I feel like I'm a little bit too distanced from from that to make effective decisions on what kind of data we can collect but that might be an opportunity for libraries to explore what kind of statistics they could potentially gather out of a tool like this and then the last one is fairly apparent getting that visible library presence in the online classroom space