Informal observations of a practical and creative approach piloting Blended Library Instruction for undergraduate Civil Architecture and Engineering students, in collaboration with faculty. At Illinois Institute of Technology students don’t receive library instruction as a required class or in... Show moreInformal observations of a practical and creative approach piloting Blended Library Instruction for undergraduate Civil Architecture and Engineering students, in collaboration with faculty. At Illinois Institute of Technology students don’t receive library instruction as a required class or in tandem with a composition class. Faculty will schedule one-time sessions, which ideally should be planned with a class assignment in mind, but students are rarely engaged with a one time instruction. Many have IKIA syndrome or I Know It Already syndrome. The Millennials are a group that has integrated technology into every aspect of their lives and they assume that retrieving useful or necessary information will be easy. When they discover this isn’t the case lack of time, heightened anxiety, and increased frustration can prevent them from doing their best work. By intentionally creating a similar crisis prior to library instruction, students were more interested in what they stood to gain during pending library instruction. In this presentation we will discuss: 1) A creative means of delivering library instruction to a traditionally challenging population: engineering undergraduate students 2) Qualitative information collected via multiple assignments and interpreted in a quantitative fashion, as well as our observations. 3) A method for preparing students for library instruction that can be applied in almost any discipline without asking the instructor to sacrifice class time. Show less
