“Use Funnier Memes Please”: Assessing Instructional Video Tutorials using UX and Participatory Design

Instructional video tutorials have been a commonly adopted method for library instructors to extend their reach as teachers. The limitations of one-shot instruction sessions often require ingenuitive approaches to harness student attention and equip them with the skills and attitudinal awareness to successfully navigate academic library research. One way to extend instructional work is to implement video tutorials before or after a one-shot session. Practical research skills are often fruitful opportunities for developing instructional tutorials, such as database demonstrations or processes of developing keywords. Yet, these types of tutorials often require more frequent updates to ensure they match the platform's latest versioning and that the examples provided are most relevant to the topics being studied in the course. On the contrary, conceptual video tutorials that introduce novice researchers to the dynamic underpinning of academic research, such as source evaluation and research processes, have more longevity than their practical counterparts. Whether the tutorial has a shorter or longer shelf life, we endeavored to assess the impact of both practical and conceptual library video tutorials made at our institution. We desired to know how our diverse student population received these video tutorials and how well they effectively and efficiently targeted students’ research needs.

To measure the learnability, effectiveness, efficiency, and student satisfaction of our video tutorials, we invoked the use of usability research design practices and participatory research design methodology. Based on the framework of Jakob Nielson’s usability attributes, we designed two studies to measure a set of practical video tutorials and conceptual video tutorials. In the first study, we assessed the practical video tutorials through student interviews and task scenarios using the UX framework. We re-design our second research study to include both UX and participatory research methodology to assess conceptual video tutorials. These two methodologies are not commonly used in the same research study to assess video tutorials; however, we found that adding participatory design methodology enhanced our UX assessment efforts as students' learning needs could be more fully expressed.

Since we work at a large public university library serving a highly diverse student body, we desired first to engage our first-year, non-native English Speaking undergraduate students. These students participated in individual interviews, focus group discussions, task scenarios, and concept mapping activities. Through these efforts, our study provided a robust textual and graphical data set, offering us better insight into how our practical and conceptual-based video tutorials complement students’ prior knowledge and burgeoning research need as novice researchers. The added benefit of this mixed methods approach is that the dataset can be triangulated to validate seminal research findings. In this virtual presentation, we will introduce audience members to our assessment efforts, including how these efforts have evolved and what we have learned from this process. After attending our presentation, audience members will have a better insight into our research methodology, rationales for using usability and participatory design to assess video tutorials, and preliminary outcomes from our analysis.

Recording: https://youtu.be/8veng6EjE3w