WEBVTT

1
00:00:02.850 --> 00:00:12.330
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: Good morning, everyone, my name is Ashley Todd-Diaz and I am the Assistant University Librarian for Special Collections and University Archives at Towson University.

2
00:00:13.139 --> 00:00:22.950
Cleary, Peyton: And hi Good morning, my name is pete and cleary i'm an alumni of Towson University, where I worked with Dr Todd Diaz and i'm also an incoming graduate student at the University of Delaware.

3
00:00:24.420 --> 00:00:33.300
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So we are sharing our presentation with you today - Back to the drawing board: Adapting a student focused research, study during the pandemic.

4
00:00:34.590 --> 00:00:49.500
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So it just briefly this study we're going to talk primarily about our search process and how our research process had to be flexible and adaptive during the pandemic so we're not going to share our research results yet.

5
00:00:50.610 --> 00:00:53.280
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So you'll just have to come to our next presentation.

6
00:00:54.780 --> 00:00:58.740
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: But without more to do.

7
00:00:59.940 --> 00:01:11.220
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So our research purpose was really focused on understanding how much students at thousand were aware of special collections and university archives.

8
00:01:11.820 --> 00:01:24.240
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: which we are going to refer to as SCUA. So Peyton joined our team in early 2020 so January 2020 as a student leader.

9
00:01:24.630 --> 00:01:37.200
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: In our library and, as we were talking about school and wanting to engage more with students, we struck on this idea of student awareness and how students use school.

10
00:01:37.860 --> 00:01:56.940
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: And why they come to us and the potential for engaging more students as not just researchers, but also donors and can have active participants that can engage with but also embrace the special collections and university archives of something that they can contribute to.

11
00:01:58.890 --> 00:02:13.860
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: But as we can talk more about this and look more at this topic we realized that while we are engaging students and we're conducting various types of outreach and research instruction and different exhibits, social media campaigns,

12
00:02:14.640 --> 00:02:25.350
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: it's more of a traditional focus that is still at the heart of it serving the purpose and the needs of special collections and university archives and not necessarily our students.

13
00:02:25.680 --> 00:02:34.230
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So, for example, this image is of a group of students who were coming to SCUA, as part of a class as part of their freshman seminar.

14
00:02:34.860 --> 00:02:41.730
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So they're getting to learn about a new resource, but on the other hand, they're being required to come to this

15
00:02:42.450 --> 00:02:53.700
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: research lab as part of their class so it's not an elective that they're necessarily you know interested in coming to for their own personal interest or desire,

16
00:02:54.030 --> 00:03:09.600
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: it's something that they're being required to do, and so we started reflecting on how many of our current outreach methods are really more focused, rather than being student centered and how we could bring a new approach to what we're doing.

17
00:03:12.420 --> 00:03:20.700
Cleary, Peyton: So, in line with that purpose, and what the themes of student awareness and student engagement, we decided that we wanted to develop our study with

18
00:03:20.970 --> 00:03:29.610
Cleary, Peyton: a student or learner centered approach or theory and this theory is really commonly used in the field of education it's closely related to constructivism.

19
00:03:29.940 --> 00:03:40.230
Cleary, Peyton: Which just calls for students to be actively engaged in the learning experiences that they have so the takeaway is of this theory is that it's inclusive collaborative and active.

20
00:03:40.500 --> 00:03:51.180
Cleary, Peyton: So we wanted to see how can this relate to the work that's being done by Librarians and archivists and, most importantly, our research question then was, how do students want to be centered and outreach efforts.

21
00:03:57.570 --> 00:04:10.530
Cleary, Peyton: So the planning for this began in January of 2020. Initially we knew that we wanted to develop a survey that would be deployed to ideally undergraduate students graduate students.

22
00:04:10.770 --> 00:04:21.360
Cleary, Peyton: We had lofty goals at the beginning of this planning process, this was my first project that I personally worked on at the library, and it was the first research survey that I had personally developed.

23
00:04:21.720 --> 00:04:28.800
Cleary, Peyton: So I was definitely under some illusions about how easy the process was so thankfully, it was a really great learning experience but.

24
00:04:29.190 --> 00:04:37.320
Cleary, Peyton: We started with developing some questions that we thought would get to the themes of student awareness and engagement. Things like:

25
00:04:37.530 --> 00:04:50.430
Cleary, Peyton: What do students already know about the archives, if anything? How often are they engage or do they not engage at all? And things like that, so when we first developed the first iteration of the survey,

26
00:04:51.420 --> 00:05:00.330
Cleary, Peyton: that was before the COVID pandemic began, so when we envisioned the survey happening, it was on campus it was being done, perhaps with

27
00:05:00.630 --> 00:05:10.710
Cleary, Peyton: iPads approaching students in the lobby of the library, or maybe visiting their classes or elsewhere on campus and us personally being there with them to answer questions that they might have.

28
00:05:11.100 --> 00:05:18.660
Cleary, Peyton: And so it did have that student centered approach at its heart, unfortunately, once the Kobe pandemic began we quickly realized that.

29
00:05:18.960 --> 00:05:24.030
Cleary, Peyton: The original vision that we have for the survey just wasn't going to pan out so we switched and

30
00:05:24.420 --> 00:05:28.410
Cleary, Peyton: began to plan it as a virtual survey that would be administered over email.

31
00:05:28.740 --> 00:05:36.600
Cleary, Peyton: And so, when we originally applied to IRB we thought that things might turn back around, and we would still be able to do in person research.

32
00:05:36.900 --> 00:05:45.900
Cleary, Peyton: So we started with that hope, but we did have to kind of reverse back to the virtual and hybrid model once it was clear that students would not be on campus in the fall.

33
00:05:49.920 --> 00:05:59.160
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: yeah if you can think back to spring 2020 there was a lot of uncertainty, there was a lot of back and forth and hopeful

34
00:05:59.610 --> 00:06:10.110
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: thinking about what was going to be possible in the fall. I mean initially it was just going to be two weeks where we were all going to be at home and then you know, we would be able to come back.

35
00:06:10.620 --> 00:06:18.630
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: And so Peyton and I spent that time where we were virtual between March and May

36
00:06:19.320 --> 00:06:33.870
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: really thinking about our IRB application. Thinking about our research purpose, thinking about our survey instrument, putting together all the documentation, so that we would be ready to apply once we had a better sense of what the fall looks like.

37
00:06:34.890 --> 00:06:43.710
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: And we knew that we had to deploy our survey in the fall because Peyton's student leader position, which is part of our ALIST program at the library,

38
00:06:44.430 --> 00:07:00.930
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: was only for the calendar year of 2020. So our initial plan was that we would get all of the the planning done in the spring and then be able to deploy and and have time to really work without results before she left the Program.

39
00:07:02.280 --> 00:07:12.780
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So our IRB process worked fine in a virtual environment, we had a shared Google Doc we both added content to it, we met via regularly,

40
00:07:13.620 --> 00:07:23.490
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: and we were really excited in May when we finally submitted our IRB application and didn't hear anything back. And we figured,

41
00:07:24.300 --> 00:07:34.080
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: that's typical, right? I mean not only is there a pandemic going on, but it's the end of the school year and it had been a really trying time for faculty

42
00:07:34.830 --> 00:07:40.140
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: who were the members of the IRB committee that were going to be reviewing our proposal.

43
00:07:41.130 --> 00:07:46.680
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So we just kind of took it one step at a time and continued working on our project and

44
00:07:47.400 --> 00:07:57.090
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: doing our lit review stuff and kind of taking things in stride and not letting it bother us. And then in July, we found out that

45
00:07:58.020 --> 00:08:11.550
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: there was an issue. The IRB committee had met and realized that, amongst all of this uncertainty and not really knowing what's going to happen in the fall, we weren't going to be able to do in-person

46
00:08:13.170 --> 00:08:18.900
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: data Collection. So as Peyton mentioned, we had to go back and rewrite our IRB application.

47
00:08:19.530 --> 00:08:29.280
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So that meant not just reviewing our survey and trying to make sure that our questions were clear, so that it, you know limited the amount of

48
00:08:29.760 --> 00:08:42.720
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: questions or uncertainty that respondents might have as they were going through the survey on their own, but also changing all of our methodology to reflect the fact that we weren't going to be talking anybody in-person.

49
00:08:44.460 --> 00:08:55.350
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So, by the time we rewrote everything and resubmitted we didn't actually get IRB approval until August. Which again,

50
00:08:56.040 --> 00:09:11.790
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: there is still a lot of uncertainty at Towson and many of the UMD schools. We all thought that we would be back in person, until that very first week of classes when everything was suddenly halted because of

51
00:09:12.870 --> 00:09:23.730
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: positive COVID tests on campus. So August still felt, you know, it was close to the Semester, but everything was up in the air, so we again were just taking it in stride.

52
00:09:24.990 --> 00:09:29.460
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: And so we knew that we would be able to deploy our survey

53
00:09:30.660 --> 00:09:33.990
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: in the fall, which is when we had originally planned.

54
00:09:35.970 --> 00:09:42.150
Cleary, Peyton: So the survey that we initially administered was our pilot survey, so we were able to send this out in September.

55
00:09:42.450 --> 00:09:48.510
Cleary, Peyton: The very beginning of the semester we did let about two weeks of the Semester go by, to make sure students were settled, especially with

56
00:09:48.780 --> 00:09:57.630
Cleary, Peyton: just how crazy and unusual that semester was for freshmen and for everyone. So the way that we administered this survey was via email.

57
00:09:58.290 --> 00:10:05.430
Cleary, Peyton: Towson University and many other universities are automatically enrolled in the G suite or something similar, maybe Microsoft.

58
00:10:05.820 --> 00:10:16.410
Cleary, Peyton: It's G suite at Towson University, so all students received an email to their personal gmail account that they had for school, which was a positive thing, but also came with drawbacks because

59
00:10:16.770 --> 00:10:25.440
Cleary, Peyton: it's hard to say if every student is constantly checking their school email account so that was a risk that we had to take in order to keep everybody safe.

60
00:10:25.680 --> 00:10:32.370
Cleary, Peyton: So the random sample that we was offered by the research department at Towson was 200 students.

61
00:10:32.670 --> 00:10:41.880
Cleary, Peyton: 150 of those students were undergraduates and 50 were graduates. In addition to that, we also took the extra step of emailing a purposive sample of faculty that

62
00:10:42.510 --> 00:10:50.160
Cleary, Peyton: already had a close relationship with SCUA and the library, in general, maybe because they came and took a class there or something

63
00:10:50.580 --> 00:10:59.730
Cleary, Peyton: similar, or had done research with one of the archivists. So we just requested them to please pass the survey on to your students and we also promoted it on social media.

64
00:11:00.120 --> 00:11:03.540
Cleary, Peyton: So between those three methods of getting this pilot survey out there

65
00:11:03.900 --> 00:11:15.930
Cleary, Peyton: we received 52 responses. But one of the issues was that of those three types of ways that we got it up there, the one that worked the best was the purposive sample with faculty members sharing it directly with

66
00:11:16.620 --> 00:11:30.600
Cleary, Peyton: a couple of their classes and that meant that one major was heavily represented, which was the history major. So the responses were fairly good and we did receive a good amount of them for the environment in which we are conducting the survey.

67
00:11:31.020 --> 00:11:37.320
Cleary, Peyton: But it kind of skewed our data, in a sense that we weren't getting a big sample of students and we weren't getting

68
00:11:37.590 --> 00:11:46.140
Cleary, Peyton: to see how students that might not frequently engage with archives as history majors would think about the archives and about awareness.

69
00:11:46.500 --> 00:11:51.660
Cleary, Peyton: So that made us go back to the drawing board, as our title suggests, and we had to really rethink

70
00:11:52.140 --> 00:11:57.570
Cleary, Peyton: how do we get this out to more majors? How do we make sure that more students are represented?

71
00:11:57.870 --> 00:12:06.090
Cleary, Peyton: Another issue with that as we've mentioned the students were taking the survey on their own there wasn't really anyone that they could talk to throughout the process. So

72
00:12:06.420 --> 00:12:11.670
Cleary, Peyton: several respondents were putting question marks as their answers to questions because they weren't understanding

73
00:12:12.630 --> 00:12:17.820
Cleary, Peyton: the information that we wanted, and we weren't able to help them out because it wasn't being done in person.

74
00:12:18.180 --> 00:12:31.110
Cleary, Peyton: So what we did, then, was we realized that this can't be the only phase of data collection, this is going to be our pilot survey we're going to redeploy and redevelop a whole new phase of data collection,

75
00:12:31.800 --> 00:12:42.060
Cleary, Peyton: which actually we'll talk about in a moment. So we just went back to the drawing board, we redesigned a couple of our questions we added a few new questions that we hadn't asked before.

76
00:12:42.390 --> 00:12:50.820
Cleary, Peyton: And we rethought, how many students need to be in that random sample in order to make sure that more respondents are getting access to the survey.

77
00:12:54.900 --> 00:12:57.480
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: As Peyton mentioned,

78
00:12:59.190 --> 00:13:09.030
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: we realized we needed to make a number of changes and since we realized we were going to be back in a virtual environment for spring,

79
00:13:09.780 --> 00:13:26.910
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: we figured that we would just revise our instrument, which you know we could keep the rest of our IRB application the same in terms of our methodology and just explain why we were changing questions for clarity or to have a more student centered focus.

80
00:13:28.290 --> 00:13:39.600
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So we received approval for our revised IRB proposal in March of 2021 and we were able to get thinking about deployment.

81
00:13:41.370 --> 00:13:50.970
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: One issue that I learned from as I emailed about getting a random sample of student email addresses

82
00:13:51.540 --> 00:13:59.760
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: was in my first email for the pilot phase, I said something to the effect of: "We would really like to get 200 responses."

83
00:14:00.540 --> 00:14:10.080
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: And that was translated by my recipient across campus as "200 emails." And obviously, anybody who has sent out a survey knows that

84
00:14:10.860 --> 00:14:16.980
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: if you're looking for a certain response number, then you need to really inflate the amount of

85
00:14:17.520 --> 00:14:36.960
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: potential respondents because not everybody is going to respond to your survey. So this time we decided we were going to up the total number and ask for 500 student emails, and so they gave us 350 undergrad and 150 grad, which was lovely. 

86
00:14:38.820 --> 00:14:47.730
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: And this time, as Peyton mentioned, because we realized that targeting certain professors that we had a strong relationship with seemed to skew

87
00:14:48.690 --> 00:14:58.170
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: who we were getting responses from, instead we asked a purposive sample of liaison Librarians to pass along the survey.

88
00:14:58.680 --> 00:15:10.920
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So rather than just you know kind of hitting a few departments, we would be able to touch many more departments and benefit off of those relationships that our library colleagues have developed over time.

89
00:15:12.750 --> 00:15:30.240
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: I think the one snag in our plan, though, was that we deployed later in the Semester and so as people were in post spring break, we wanted to wait until after spring break, but I think we kind of got caught up in the end of the Semester, handing in finals...

90
00:15:31.770 --> 00:15:38.190
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: And I think people were just really burned out, you know, after having spent a year in a virtual environment.

91
00:15:38.820 --> 00:15:57.960
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: Particularly our freshmen and sophomore students who really hadn't had a chance to engage with the campus and the kind of learning environment that is typically employed at Towson. We only received, of our 500 potential respondents, we only receive 24 responses.

92
00:16:00.000 --> 00:16:10.110
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: After multiple you know reminder emails and again, promoting on social media, I think it was just unfortunate timing.

93
00:16:11.490 --> 00:16:24.030
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: The benefit, though, is those revisions that we made to our instrument really did improve the data that we collected. So rather than getting a lot of question marks or unclear answers,

94
00:16:24.420 --> 00:16:34.920
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: the 24 responses were really rich with data and, amazingly, because we added in that question about the respondents' major we were able to see that we reached a

95
00:16:35.340 --> 00:16:46.620
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: much more diverse group of respondents. Twenty different majors were represented, so we had a nice cross section of students, even if we had a lower number.

96
00:16:47.700 --> 00:17:06.540
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: But this meant we needed to go back to the drawing board, again, because at this point, we have only collected roughly 75 responses and we were hoping for many more than that, since we have an overall student population at Towson is roughly 23,000 students.

97
00:17:08.100 --> 00:17:08.910
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So.

98
00:17:09.930 --> 00:17:22.380
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: Our next steps moving into the fall of 2021 is to redeploy second phase. So our first step

99
00:17:23.550 --> 00:17:28.110
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: is investigating whether or not we're going to be able to collect in person data.

100
00:17:29.460 --> 00:17:38.250
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So our initial plan for this study was to talk directly with students,

101
00:17:39.450 --> 00:17:41.220
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: which obviously the pandemic

102
00:17:42.390 --> 00:17:53.490
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: did not allow for in any way, shape, or form. So in speaking with the IRB office they're still kind of on the fence about in-person, data collection.

103
00:17:53.910 --> 00:18:02.310
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: They are not saying that it's an impossibility, at least at this point, although we know we're familiar with that air of uncertainty that's been

104
00:18:02.760 --> 00:18:10.590
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: very present over the last year and a half. At this point they told us that, if we submitted - as long as we

105
00:18:11.130 --> 00:18:18.810
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: add in certain language, saying that we would be wearing masks and we would be you know cognizant of

106
00:18:19.170 --> 00:18:36.240
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: safe distance, social distance, and you know just taking precautions and that again, you know, reinforcing that people don't have to participate, I think if we were collecting data outside that would also assist with our IRB approval.

107
00:18:38.220 --> 00:18:46.260
Cleary, Peyton: So we're very excited about this phase, hopefully, if all goes to plan, this would be the final phase of data collection. But

108
00:18:46.500 --> 00:18:51.990
Cleary, Peyton: the drawing board is always there and we're not afraid to go back to it if we need even more data after this phase.

109
00:18:52.260 --> 00:19:04.080
Cleary, Peyton: Perhaps there will be a phase three, it's hard to say at the moment. But our goals for this phase and kind of the next steps that we've talked about actually mentioned us being on campus doing in-person, data collection.

110
00:19:04.560 --> 00:19:13.260
Cleary, Peyton: If that were to not pan out due to IRB decisions or just overall COVID restrictions, if that needed to happen again, we would

111
00:19:13.530 --> 00:19:18.060
Cleary, Peyton: consider how we can make the virtual survey even more successful because

112
00:19:18.390 --> 00:19:30.750
Cleary, Peyton: we hit an interesting middle ground with that phase one which is that we received a lot bigger sample of majors and we received just much more rich responses that really gave us the information we were looking for 

113
00:19:31.110 --> 00:19:35.730
Cleary, Peyton: that were answering our research question of how students want to be centered, how they want to engage

114
00:19:36.270 --> 00:19:41.970
Cleary, Peyton: with the archives, which is fantastic but we just didn't get the response rate that we were looking for so

115
00:19:42.690 --> 00:19:49.590
Cleary, Peyton: there's definitely more to be done in terms of a virtual survey, if that were to happen again, and our goal

116
00:19:49.860 --> 00:20:01.320
Cleary, Peyton: whatever the format is of data collection is to get at least 100 responses, in addition to the responses that we already have, so we would end up with around 175 responses. If this

117
00:20:01.650 --> 00:20:14.100
Cleary, Peyton: all went to plan and then we would be able to use that data to apply to the outreach that's being planned and conducted at school and really work on that student centered approach at our institution.

118
00:20:19.020 --> 00:20:21.390
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: So thank you for your time this morning.

119
00:20:22.560 --> 00:20:29.460
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: We wish that we were all in-person, so that both Peyton and I could hear from you and hear what questions you might have.

120
00:20:30.630 --> 00:20:40.110
Todd-Diaz, Ashley: But we've added our contact information if you would like to get in touch and there is a Q&A session following. So thank you everybody!

121
00:20:40.620 --> 00:20:41.340
Cleary, Peyton: Thank you.