After the first year since the roll-out of Blackboard Ultra to all Level 4 and Foundation students, this research seeks to discover whether those students find it easy to access their NILE course and complete certain tasks when accessing it on their mobile phone.
Motivation With a stark increase in the number of visitors to NILE doing so with a smartphone, we wanted to hear first-hand experiences from students. We wanted to know how easy it was to access information and perform tasks. The information could be used to promote best practice for NILE course design.
A questionnaire was designed to find out why students use a phone rather than a laptop to access NILE, how much they normally use their phone and how they prefer to access and save information provided on NILE. Most of the questions included a comment section for respondents to expand upon their answers. The questionnaire was conducted online between 20 May 2022 and 31 Aug 2022. There were 14 questions and 442 responses.
The overall response was that they were able to do the majority of NILE activities on their Smartphone, without issue and were able to interact the all the functions. There was a greater percentage of positive responses from students using Blackboard Ultra on a smartphone compared to Blackboard Original. The students who felt positively about using NILE via their smartphones, said it was easy to use. Some of the negative comments, mentioned the speed at which content loaded, although this may have been due to the quality of their mobile data connection.
The survey concluded that most students found it easy to access information and carry out activities on NILE whilst on their smartphone, as long as they had a good mobile data connection. The findings support the work the ongoing work of the LearnTech team to encourage and support staff to design mobile-friendly NILE courses.
This poster outlines a research project which uses magic to explore dissertation skills with students. Students, in a session on preparing for the dissertation, learn a magic trick, and then use their experiences learning that trick to reflect and find connections with their dissertation, and the process of researching and writing. The session integrates academic skills essential for the dissertation such as critical thinking, linking, metacognitive reflection, and conceptualising the process of a long project. It also harnesses magic’s capacity to stimulate curiosity, and to engage and motivate, embedding dissertation support that is hoped to be memorable and motivating. The project gathers qualitative data from questions within the teaching session, and afterwards, to evaluate the use of a magic trick in teaching dissertation skills. This research explores the practical acquisition and development of skills and ideas alongside the emotional and motivational aspects of the dissertation process.
In the summer of 2022, the University of Northampton moved to a new library management platform (from Sierra-Primo-Aspire to Alma-Primo VE -Leganto) with a view to improving user workflows and the user experience. This poster will look at inter library loan usage data from before and after the platform change in the context of the new improved user workflows.
In 2022-2023, the University of Northampton library conducted a brief survey to identify where students were accessing their academic books and their reasoning behind this. In particular, we were interested to see if any students were aware of or paying to use the academic book subscription service, Perlego. Perlego is promoted by the UniDays student app, and we had anecdotal evidence that students were subscribing to Perlego to access academic e-books that the library already provided as e-books. We were interested as to why this might be happening. We were also wanted to see if students had a preference that was different to where they most often accessed books. This poster will outline our findings.
The Service Development Team comprises a number of different work roles, each requiring a differing level of physical activity. This poster aims to demonstrate the step counts of four divisions of Service Development over the course of one week. Each division broadly represents a different pattern and mode of work. The four divisions are: Senior Roles, Customer Service Supervisors, Customer Service Assistants, Environment Assistants. This poster will highlight the differences in collective step count between each day and the collective total step count for the week.
The poster explores Service Development staff’s personality traits and types as per the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. The aim is to disprove negative pop culture stereotypes of library staff and hopefully, demonstrate that SD staff is successful as a front facing library team due to its focus on people skills.
A poster to showcase what we do in our day-to-day as a Reading List team: