#ProgramCoordinatorProblems

Yes the title is a hashtag. No I don't care.

The hard thing about coordinating information literacy is that it's not a degree program. It's skills that are sprinkled (ahem, scaffolded) across the majors. I've commiserated with writing-across-the-curriculum coordinators who are in a similar boat, except for whatever reason, faculty understand the value of writing well better than they understand the value of thinking critically about the discovery, use, and creation of information. At least, it looks greener over there from my side of the fence.



So I'm trying to assess all of these moving parts - our information literacy course, the information literacy skills integrated in specific courses, and information literacy in the majors. All of it, even though the assessment guy on campus is all "don't worry about anybody but yourself." He recommended only assessing the course (ONE) that I have control over, even though our students get library instruction in lots of other courses (specifically, 46 in the spring).

But I want to assess all of them!

**This is where I want to go on a tangent about formative assessment, and discuss the pros/cons of assessing what students learn in an instruction session verses over the entire semester. I'll save that for a future post.**

Anyways, dear reader, I am in my oh-god-the-semester-is-starting panic. I've got orientations, scheduling library instruction, liaison outreach, creating a syllabus, and a few other things that are ongoing, like creating an assessment workshop for the fall. I am in task list mode, crossing one thing off after another, sending emails like a boss. Then, in what should have been a routine email reply to setting up library instruction, the professor asks if we can switch the day of instruction this fall because of the information literacy assessment her department is doing [emphasis added].

Cue a J-Law gif:

"May I ask, what information literacy assessment are you doing for your class?" That is what I wrote as part of my email response, in lieu of the above gif. This is a department the library has tried many ways to integrate with, much less assess information literacy outcomes. It's still not quite clear what they'll be assessing (a variety of worksheets and a quiz are in the mix), but I'm putting on my sleuthing outfit (you know, when I'm not wearing a cardigan) to figure it out. 

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