PSEC Instruction Committee
Meeting Minutes
3/9/2010

In attendance: Camille Andrews, Ken Bolton, Gaby Castro Gessner (RAU liaison), Tony Cosgrave (Chair), Jaron Porciello, Lynn Thitchener

Announcements and updates

Tony reminded Committee members about the Center for Teaching Excellence talk, "Strategies for Increasing Student Engagement" that will be held at Mann on March 10th, from 12 noon - 1 pm.

A number of Committee members attended the Mann Teaching Experience workshops. The sessions covered how to develop learning outcomes, the use of technology, and active learning strategies. The overall impression was that the workshops were very useful. Ken announced that following his involvement in the workshops, he set up an appointment with David Way to go over the syllabus and activities he has planned for a course he will be teaching next semester.

Tony mentioned that he would be away for our next scheduled meeting and asked whether members thought we should hold the meeting without him, cancel, or attempt to reschedule. In view of our deadlines on various projects, the members decided that we should try to reschedule the meeting.

Tony also pointed to the pages on the Library Home page that are the responsibility of the Instruction Committee. On the Workshops and Instruction page, we removed the Ornithology Lab from the list of libraries offering instruction. Tony also already resolved an issue with the system-wide Instruction Request form. He discovered that if users did not "select a library", the request was not routed. He asked technical support to change this form to make "select a library" a required field.

Report on development of learning outcomes

Tony has asked to be put on the PSEC agenda in order to present the draft of our Instruction Program Mission Statement. This statement has already been approved by CUL instruction coordinators.

Gaby reported on the progress of the Learning Outcomes subgroup (Gaby, Jaron, Camille, Tony and Lynn). The group has met twice. We have identified several themes - awareness of services and resources, ethical use of resources, critical thinking in the evaluation of resources, and the ability to locate resources. We are working on recommendations for student learning outcomes to dovetail, later, with program-level outcomes. We reviewed the Cornell University Learning Outcomes and noted that the list includes Information Literacy. Our learning outcomes recommendations will be based on Cornell's learning outcomes and the Cornell Library's mission statement.

Update on active learning techniques sessions

Camille discussed the upcoming Active Learning Techniques session. The session will be a condensed version of the Mann Teaching Experience workshops. Camille will lead the session and plans to also have participants share their own active learning techniques.

Recap on ACRL Information Literacy and Assessment webinar series

Lynn reported that attendance at the 3 sessions ran from 6-9 people, despite the snowstorm and connection problems experienced during session 2. Several people were able to come to all three. Because we were unable to connect to the second session, Lynn obtained the recorded version and this was forwarded to all attendees. The third session took place without incident - no snowstorm and no technical difficulties. Lynn will request copies of all the recorded sessions to post to our wiki.

Instruction database discussion continued

Jaron reported that the Instruction Database subgroup of BIG initially looked at Confluence as a possible instruction material repository. The group has since decided to use the Greenstone (an open source repository tool) software instead as it will better serve their needs. The subgroup is hoping to have a prototype to demonstrate to BIG by March 18th.

Other business

Tony shared the results from a Needs Assessment conducted 2 years ago. The committee decided that we should send out a new needs assessment survey to better capture topics that were not on our radar when the first survey went out, such as writing learning outcomes and conducting effective assessment.

Submitted by Lynn Thitchener
3/15/2010