Scaling Up: Asynchronous Information Literacy Instruction for First-Year Business Students

In April 2019, I sent an email to the BUSLIB-L listserv, asking colleagues to share links and descriptions of existing asynchronous information literacy instruction programs that they created or knew of. The purpose of this inquiry was to identify sources of inspiration to inform the asynchronous lessons I was creating. The intent was to create comprehensive lessons for first-year business students on a platform that was interactive, mobile-optimized, economical, ADA compliant, and provided built-in assessment capabilities. The listserv generated several leads to some excellent asynchronous lessons/modules developed by business librarians for their first-year business students. Interestingly, a number of other business librarians were interested in the responses I received as they were also looking for ideas to implement at their institutions. After carefully evaluating several e-learning platforms, the instruction team and I decided that Articulate Rise 360 provided most of the features and functionalities needed to create the critical, learner-centered educational experiences that we envisioned. Articulate Rise 360 is an e-learning platform that lets instructors build highly inter-active courses that are accessible from any device. This tool allowed us to radically scale up our delivery of the workshop to students, reaching 82 percent of first-year business students compared to 30 percent prior to the adoption of Rise 360. Rise 360 is now a staple in the Liaison Services Department; it is used by the instruction team, functional specialists, and other liaisons to create interactive asynchronous lessons. In addition to class-specific courses like BUSI 3302, Rise 360 was used to create several short information literacy lessons covering topics from research question development to finding, accessing, and citing data to evaluating information sources. Articulate Rise 360 has its limitations, but one of the major downsides is that it can be cost-prohibitive. However, it is also user-friendly, from both the instructor/content designer and the learner's perspectives. It integrates with Blackboard and other learning management systems via SCORM (Sharable Content Objective Reference Model). This allows librarians and instructors to track the progress of students as they make their way through the lessons. In addition to the built-in knowledge checks, librarians may also incorporate survey tools like Qualtrics into lessons to enhance activity completion tracking and assessment.