The Library Workshops have been my labor of love. When I envisioned the workshops, my goal was to go beyond tutorials, and move into small, virtual classes. Each workshop is structured like a one-hour course and requires students to reflect on their learning. Most reflections are structured as two prompts: one that checks knowledge and one that asks for a personal narrative of how that knowledge can be or has been used. Here is an example from the Avoiding Plagiarism Workshop:
1) explain the most important concept(s) that you learned from this workshop. Be sure to explain how completing this workshop has changed or not changed your original definition of plagiarism. (75 word minimum)
2) provide a specific example of when you might have accidentally plagiarized or a specific example of how you make sure that you have not plagiarized. Be sure your answer is specific. (75 word minimum)
I recorded a new Workshop Overview video to reflect the new way to submit grades for the workshops. You can view the video through the link below.
Workshop Overview published on YouTube 8/17/2026
The workshops have been very successful across disciplines. Faculty from English, math, business, history, ethnic studies, art history, sociology, nutrition, and counseling are using them as assignments in their courses, either as part of the course or as extra credit. Enrollment and student satisfaction remain high. The table below provides an overview of the usage of the Avoiding Plagiarism (AP), Evaluating Sources (ES), Library Orientation (LO), Research Basics (RB), and MLA Basics (MB), and GenAI Basics (GB) workshops.
The total number of completed workshops since Fall 2020 is 34,872 and still counting.
Note that numbers remain consistent or increase over time, especially in the area of summer workshops, which show a marked increase year over year after the pandemic.
GenAI Basics Workshop
To meet the evolving needs of students developing information literacy skills, I developed a new library workshop that piloted to LIB100 during Summer 2026 and rolled out to the campus in fall: GenAI Basics. Here are the highlights of the new workshop:
- Stresses the importance of students reading the syllabus/assignment instructions carefully to see if or to what extent GenAI can be used in a course or on an assignment (Faculty make the decision based on subject-matter expertise)
- Presents the pros and cons of using GenAI (We take a neutral stance.)
- Explains what GenAI is and isn’t
- Gives tips on how to use GenAI responsibly
- Clarifies the relationship between GenAI and learning
- Provides a roadmap for creating effective prompts with an emphasis on sequential prompting
The workshop contains 6 sections with 6 quizzes. Each section contains a video I created using Camtasia then published in YouTube. You can view each video through the links below.
- GB1 published on YouTube 5/12/2026
- GB2 published on YouTube 5/27/2026
- GB3 published on YouTube 6/3/2026
- GB4 published on YouTube 5/19/2026
- GB5 published on YouTube 6/3/2026
- GB6 published on YouTube 6/3/2026
Early feedback from students has been positive. Here is a representative answer from a student to the reflective question.
1. The most important concept I learned from this workshop is how intentional you have to be when using GenAI. Before this workshop I honestly didn’t think too much about it I just saw it as a helpful tool that could help me speed things up. But the workshop made me see that using GenAI responsibly means checking the syllabus understanding the assignment rules and making sure the AI isn’t replacing my own learning. I wouldn’t say that it completely changed my feeling about AI, but it definitely made me more cautious.
2. One specific example of when I used GenAI was for a reflection assignment in one of my child development classes. I already had my personal experience and ideas, but I was just struggling to organize them into a clear structure. So, I went to a GenAI and asked for help to outline my thoughts and suggest a way to arrange the paragraphs. I didn’t copy anything word for word I just used the outline as a guide to make my writing flow better. This actually made me feel less overwhelmed and it brought down my stress I felt like I just needed a little push and it gave me that without taking over my whole assignment.
