“Making It Happen”: Building Relational Teaching into the Online World of COVID-19

abstract:The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic required shifting information literacy instruction from face-to-face to online formats at the University Libraries of the University of South Dakota. This case study narrates how the instructional team there introduced innovations into a Freshman Writing course that enabled instrumental (that is, goal-oriented) and relational teaching in the online-only environment. The team applied social network theory and a disaster response model to plan and analyze their innovations. The affordances of the Zoom video conferencing platform and the embedded librarian model enabled them to expand their information literacy instruction to include online students for the first time. The instructional team plans to extend these innovations to other information literacy mandated courses.