Online Instruction during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Inclusivity, Accessibility, Challenges, and Opportunities

In the uniquely fraught 2020–2021 academic year, the Instruction Committee of the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) hosted two online discussions for members regarding how the COVID-19 pandemic had affected their teaching experiences. CARLI has 129 member libraries. The first discussion, on November 6, 2020, focused on issues of accessibility and inclusion in online teaching environments. For the second discussion, on March 3, 2021, the topic for discussion was broadened to cover online instruction in general. The issues and ideas broached in each chat overlapped significantly, and so they will be treated here as one overarching event. While most participants noted an almost total switchover to online teaching during the pandemic, the modes of online instruction that were requested seemed to vary from institution to institution. Some participants saw an immediate uptick in synchronous video conferencing sessions, while others saw a dropoff in total requests. One librarian reported being “on call” during online class times for questions that arose, which gave more flexibility than a structured session. Asynchronous instruction in the form of videos, tutorials, and other self-paced materials had a less consistent uptake, which largely seemed to depend on whether these materials had been in use pre-pandemic. Participants noted that individual librarians’ distaste for asynchronous instruction also played a role in the expansion—or not—of this mode of teaching. Outreach was attempted in some libraries to increase requests for online instruction, via liaison relationships, social media, and campus-wide emails, but some librarians stated that they did not think they would have been able to sustain such increases. Those who had used asynchronous materials before noted that they made changes to existing materials in response to the pandemic—for instance, expanding the information available in online guides, to account for the lack of synchronous sessions in which to speak on that https://doi.org/10.1080/10875301.2021.1916670