by Paschalia Terzi, Georgetown University in Qatar Library, Qatar.
At Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q), the library building is the central hub of academic life. Students meet their peers, find a quiet place to study or meet with the librarians to learn more about research. Instructional librarians at GU-Q Library support both faculty with teaching and students with learning.
Up until now, proof of learning has been through assessments, usually a paper that requires some degree of independent research on the part of the student. This is usually the point of contact between instructional librarians, faculty, and students. Instructional librarians have been teaching students how to find, access, evaluate and cite quality sources like scholarly articles and academic books.
Now that assessment methods are undergoing a period of re-evaluation due to AI, from traditional research papers to a variety of creative, multimedia projects at GU-Q, library instruction has to adapt to the new reality. This changing landscape is nothing new for libraries. During COVID-19 restrictions, faculty began assigning more assessments with creative or multimedia components, such as e-portfolios and websites.
With the arrival of ChatGPT, the range of creative or alternative assessments that faculty assigned to students has increased significantly. Library instruction at GU-Q increasingly needs to support projects, including but not limited to:
- E-portfolios
- Websites
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Photography
- Posters
- Comics
How should library instruction best support these novel types of assignments? My generation of librarians generally did not engage with these kinds of projects during our studies; instead, we relied on research papers to pass courses. The same applies to the majority of our working years. Moreover, the “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education”, which is usually used as the blueprint for library instruction in US academic institutions, also primarily focuses on the research paper. According to my experience and recent research, it remains useful in the age of AI, but in my opinion, other frameworks should also be added to instructional librarians’ toolkit for teaching and training. In short, to help students achieve success with these new types of assessments, instructional librarians need to re-train and up-skill to include multimedia production and creating with AI.
One such tool is the “CML’s 5 Key Questions and Core Concepts (Q/Tips) for Consumers and Producers” of Media, especially the set for media producers. Undergraduates who are creating videos and podcasts as part of their assessment should be treated as media producers, not just consumers. In addition, these skills will probably come in handy in their future jobs, where communication is increasingly conducted through audiovisual means.
In the GU-Q Library, we have tried different approaches to tackle these new challenges. Some current scholarly conversations on pedagogy in the age of AI focus on making the assessment process visible rather than the final product. Therefore, instructional librarians can try the Embedded Librarian approach: the librarian is embedded in classes and collaborates more closely with the faculty and students. For example, during a semester-long media-heavy course, students visit the librarian weekly to brainstorm their project, find and select multimedia sources and get training on software and equipment they want to use, like cameras and editing programs. For research-heavy courses like a research methods course, students can get training on AI literature review tools like Research Rabbit and learn to evaluate sources for quality using a library index like Scopus.
Another approach could be to help faculty promote Academic Integrity in the age of AI. The practice of acknowledging sources should be applied to multimedia and AI, since students now don’t rely only on scholarly sources. For example, instructional librarians can expand citation tools training for academic integrity to citing media and AI prompts. In this way, students can learn how to cite YouTube videos, streaming series episodes, podcasts and films with the help of a citation tool like Zotero, using popular citing styles like APA, MLA and Chicago. Faculty can then view the student’s citation library, or even develop it together with the librarian. The same principle can apply to prompts to an AI tool. With permalinks, this has become easier than ever.
To summarise, as libraries become hubs of multimedia production while maintaining their traditional role as providers of scholarly materials, instructional librarians need to be flexible to respond to the changing needs of faculty and students while still providing accessible, trustworthy research resources.
Author: Paschalia Terzi, Georgetown University in Qatar Library, Qatar.
