Creating a tutorial

Over the course of the last couple of months I have been working the Durham Centre for Academic Development (DCAD) to produce an interactive online tutorial titled Your Reading List and Beyond.

This tutorial is part of ‘phase 2’ or our overall tutorial programme. Phase 1 was designed, constructed and delivered in 2020 and consists of 6 tutorials which are available individually, whilst also designed to fit together to support the needs of dissertation students, whilst been available to all as standalone tutorials.

The aim of this second phase is to help users build on the skills and knowledge gained via the existing tutorials with more advanced content, but also to look to fill in any gaps not yet addressed. The Your Reading List and Beyond tutorial looks to help taught students understand the academic references on their reading list, how to find materials in Discover, how to use those results to find related materials, and how a reading list will be presented via the library’s reading list software Talis Aspire.

Ensuring tutorial effectiveness, whilst maximising opportunities for professional development, the tutorial was designed and developed collaboratively. As a librarian, I was able to outline the aims and objectives and provide the subject-matter. The DCAD learning developer was able to use this to design and create the tutorial in the most appropriate way.  The design for the tutorial was first storyboarded in Trello, supporting visual planning and rapid changes to tutorial structure, before being transferred to OneDrive in support of content co-authoring. Finally, the tutorial was created in Articulate Rise. As part of the process, I was invited to add some content directly to the tutorial myself in Articulate Rise. This was a very beneficial developmental exercise for me as a librarian, as I got to understand how various tools were being used to achieve the desired learning outcomes.

Prior to launch, an independent critique was provided by the library, before peer review by another member of the DCAD learning developer team. The tutorial is now live and is available via the ‘develop your skills’ webpages. Here you will also find the complete suite of tutorials.