Instructional Content Creation at a Distance: Lessons Learned from Two Years of Remote Collaboration

In this virtual lightning talk, teaching librarians will discuss lessons learned from an ongoing, collaborative online learning partnership between the library, first-year writing program, and campus online teaching specialists. When the project was proposed in spring 2020, the team planned to meet in person over the summer. However, with the shift to remote work due to COVID-19, all project meetings were moved to Zoom. The focus of the project also shifted from a planned series of five modules that would serve as a replacement for in-person instruction to the creation of three to four modules that could be used to supplement or reinforce concepts integral to composition courses: peer review, rhetorical analysis, multimodal literacies, and academic research. These modules were completed by the end of summer 2020 and used by several instructors in the first-year writing program during the 2020-2021 academic year. In summer 2021, the team again worked together remotely to create additional video content and modules for the first-year writing program, focusing on rhetorical analysis, writing portfolios, controversy mapping, and academic research basics.

Working remotely on these projects led to challenges but also lessons learned about effective collaboration and content creation with limited resources. After summer 2020, the team took those lessons and applied them to the project the following summer, including communicating about progress more effectively, not separating into smaller groups, incorporating more working meetings, moving into scripting and production more quickly, and creating high-quality audio and video with basic equipment. The project went more smoothly the second year, and the team was able to create content more efficiently. This virtual lightning talk will focus on these lessons learned from working remotely on a cross-campus collaborative project and how those lessons could be applied to other collaborative instructional design projects, whether in-person, hybrid, or remote.