tutorials

Tutorials

How do you manage tutorials over time?

• • What's a good way to manage changes?

    • Database w/ all tutorials that reminds people to go and check their content

    • Is it worth it to make database-specific tutorials?

      • Hyun-Duck is doing screencaptures with annotations (keeping them in flickr) - nothing ncsu specific - links to vendor tutorials (best trade-off in terms of effort)

    • For staff training on dbs - doing elluminate training, then capturing that and having that be a tutorial

    • campus-specific concepts (i.e. getting reserves) vs. general concepts (i.e. pop vs. scholarly)

  • How much does quality really matter for short point-of-need tutorials?

    • can use a mix of jing for shorter, more quickly changing and camtasia/captivate for more polished

  • maintenance is more of an organizational issue more than a tech issues

    • deciding about the level of quality you want to maintain

    • negative ramifications if you have lower quality/less frequently updated

    • moving from a model where few people can do tutorials to where most people can

  • Issues of currency, etc. for tutorials

    • When do we update, when do we revamp?

    • When you're trying to decide - evaluate whether or not that need still exists

What should be a tutorial?

• • Maintenance issue

  • How do we decide whether something is worth keeping updated? -- assessment/usage issue

  • Subject librarians might see lots of common questions/issues from consults and instruction sessions

How Do I

• • Does this concept resonate with students?

Workflows

• • having people responsible for content look regularly at the content of the tutorials

Reusable pieces of content

• • What kind of mechanisms could we have for managing things like this?

  • How can we impose a structure of using modular content so that everything is consistent? But then there's the issue that the content is just being duplicated, so it's still a major issue for management

  • NCSU will have streaming media server - hopefully all video tutorials will be on this server eventually

  • Could we have a structure where you can pull together difft tutorial chunks to make unique tutorials - i.e. making a playlist for the streaming media

  • When you break something down into modules - how do you put the pieces back together?

  • Can we make modules to share?

    • Dre will make us all different xml files and forms to interface with them. Thanks, Dre!

  • But what about people who are insistent that content must be customized to their specifications