Aided and Embedded: The Team Approach to Instructional Design

Arizona State University is the largest public university in the United States with an enrollment of 70,440 in 2010. ASU's online offerings are also expanding rapidly with a target of 30,000 students by 2020. In one program, growth and transformation from hybrid to 100% online demanded scalability to handle large enrollments. Thus an instructional designer joined the faculty/librarian team to facilitate the creation of brief, scenario-based modules that were embedded in an online course and assessed within the course management system. The instructional designer assisted in removing many of the traditional barriers associated with embedded librarianship by helping the team record and edit the modules, inserting them into the courseware, and linking module quizzes to the course gradebook. This paper describes the barriers for librarians in providing online instruction and highlights how the team roles, processes, and outcomes removed the traditional barriers and resulted in successful, embedded, and reusable modules.