Designing for Digital 2018

Academic libraries have become a nexus for open educational resources (OER) initiatives and can be a rich site for pedagogical praxis as faculty engage in the course redesign process. By leveraging our expertise in open education and UX we can support faculty to create more dynamic and usable course materials.

CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments) is an open educational resource launched in 2016. This short talk describes task-based usability testing done on the site to investigate how well users could find the results they wanted when searching for information literacy materials and how success could be improved. Six librarians and one faculty member were assigned tasks in random order from a list of eight possible task scenarios. Resulting improvements were made to the site.