How Utah State University's Library Presentation Views Went From 1,300 to 35,000 in Just 1 Year

Our Story

Niche Academy Founder & CEO, Jeromy Wilson, didn’t choose the library life. It chose him. Jeromy was only 4 years old when his father, Jim Wilson, helped found Dynix, a software company responsible for the integrated library system that replaced the need for physical card catalogs. Growing up, he tagged along to countless library conferences and events, before eventually taking a job at Dynix after graduating. But after a few years, as the world was going digital, Jeromy began to notice a problem: despite the increase in available online resources, they just weren’t being used.

Jared, Jim, & Jeromy at PLA 2018

So in 2013, Jeromy set out to find a solution, and that’s where the idea for Niche Academy was born. He started out on his own, adding to the platform in his free time and taking advantage of the industry contacts he’d already made, but he soon realized that he wasn’t going to be able to do it alone. That’s when he decided to recruit the help of former Dynix co-worker Jared Oates. Together, they were able to get Niche Academy off the ground and it wasn’t long before they found a whole team of people who believed in their idea. 

Seven years later, we are now a team of 22 (and counting!), and are trusted by over 800 library systems (including state libraries, local libraries, and consortia) all across the world. 

After getting our start with just a few short library tutorials, we’re now helping to build the future of online resources and e-learning. 

Old Approach

Training is live, either in-person or online.

New Approach

Library instruction is always available asynchronously online.

Old Result

Learners must show up at a specific time, and often in a specific place to receive the training.

New Result

Students always have access to high quality task-specific library instruction.

Learners get the most value out of library instruction when it is continually available for reference and delivered in bite-sized chunks.

Old Approach

Library instruction requires learners to go out of their way to receive it. It's presented as an appendage to the regular instruction for a course and usually limited to a few specific intro level courses.

New Approach

Library training is embedded as an assignment directly into regular online course material within the campus LMS.

Old Result

Library instruction is usually an anomalous single event in a student's academic life. Knowledge retention is limited, only a few topics are covered, and the perception of the library as an essential learning resource is limited.

New Result

Library instruction becomes an integral part of the academic experience from introductory level classes through to graduate level research. The library is able to offer a broad range of instruction including information literacy topics, guidance on specific databases, and highly focused support for discipline-specific research.

"Marketing" library instruction becomes a non-issue when it is integrated into regular course material throughout the institution.

Old Approach

Library instruction is one-size-fits-all. There is little adaptation across disciplines and almost never from course to course.

New Approach

Library instruction is tailored to the needs of individual faculty members and in support of specific courses. Course-specific instruction can include introductions to specific databases, research techniques, citation best practices, and essential information literacy skills.

Old Result

Faculty within disciplines perceive library instruction as a marginally relevant offering rather than a direct support for their own course-specific objectives.

New Result

Faculty from many disciplines collaborate closely with library staff to provide students with focused, high quality instruction that directly supports course-specific objectives. The perceived relevance and value of the library increases dramatically.

The most effective ways a library can support High Impact Educational Practices is by providing course-specific library instruction.

Old Approach

The training offered by the library changes very little between semesters and from year to year.

New Approach

The range of library instruction offerings is continually expanding and being refreshed. Database instruction is updated whenever there are user interface or functionality changes. Information literacy and research support instruction reflects emerging trends and innovations.

Old Result

The library offering is perceived as being stale and marginally relevant.

New Result

Library instruction becomes a timely, highly relevant, and indispensable resource for faculty and for students.

Fresh, up-to-date training offerings show that the library is adaptive, innovative and relevant.

In-House Creation

You can create all the necessary online instructional material yourself, either with in-house resources or by hiring a contractor. Once a core set of instructional material is created, it still needs to be assembled into custom tutorial experiences for each course and faculty member the library works with.

Result: To do this in-house, you'd have to redirect resources to focus on training staff in effective instructional design and video editing, and you will need to purchase good sound recording equipment if you don't already have it.

Price: Niche Academy’s average cost for creating a single tutorial is about $1,200. In order to match this cost, you’ll need to have in-house writers, instructional designers, illustrators, video/sound editors, and an efficient process that will allow these people to work together. To get started with a meaningful offer, you'd need at least a couple dozen tutorials. The cost for an initial offer would be at least $28,000.

If you had to outsource the video creation process or contract it piecemeal, you could expect to pay $1,000 per finished minute of professional quality video, and if you include just 10 minutes of video in each of your 24 tutorials, you're looking at a cost of $240,000.

In either case, you'd need to have a staff librarian to manage and direct the project. Salary.com indicates that the average salary for a college librarian starts at around $60,000/year. 

Once you had the needed library instruction content, you’d then need to add it to specific courses. To do this by hand for each course, you’d need editing access to courses that belong to other faculty members. From a permissions perspective, this approach is usually a non-starter. A better approach is to use a content integration mechanism like LTI or an LMS-specific content commons that allows faculty to easily add the library assignments themselves, and you’d need to provide support for faculty and students using it. Providing a satisfying experience would require at least one dedicated support person available to field questions and troubleshoot. An employee with the necessary technical and interpersonal skills costs at least $30,000-$40,000 a year.

Finally, the cost of customizing the tutorial experience for individual courses is mostly a reflection of the labor required to collect tutorial content components for each individual course. These components may include information literacy training and introductions to specific databases. This can sometimes be done by interns or student employees working closely with library staff who are familiar with the resources appropriate for specific disciplines and can facilitate communication with faculty, but you'd need to factor in the time required to train those employees. Conservatively, the time requirement here would be around 4 hours per course, and if you're able to average out the cost per hour to around $25/hr, with just 20 courses, you're looking at an additional cost of $2,000.

Timeframe: With an efficient process and readily available people with the required skills, a professional quality tutorial would take about a month to produce. For 24 tutorials, the time cost for an initial offer would be 2 years, and the customization alone of the tutorials for 20 individual courses would take another several days.

The Niche Academy platform makes it easy to assemble the needed parts for a customized course-specific tutorial from existing tutorial material, which may include introductions to discipline-specific databases, as well as research essentials like search techniques, source evaluation, & appropriate citation methods.

You can select training material from a continually expanding collection of high quality library instruction and tap into an enormous marketplace of training content maintained by a community of practitioners and library experts and, as a customer, you’ll also be able to influence Niche Academy’s content creation queue.

Result: The instructional design, video, and audio quality of Niche Academy tutorials are top notch and exactly matched to the needs of academic libraries. The tutorials are completely white-labeled for each institutional library. Faculty members can simply select what they need from a collection of available library training.

Using Niche Academy, the library can create the material once and update it on the fly, even in the middle of a semester, if necessary. Students don't have to log in outside of the campus LMS, and their progress & quiz results are automatically tracked within the system.

As an added benefit of using the Niche Academy platform, the library has automatic visibility into usage stats for library-provided training. This means real-time reports on the number of asynchronous library presentations, which make it easy to demonstrate usage of library material and the value of the library to student success.

Every Niche Academy subscription includes unlimited access to Niche Academy technical support experts. You can rely on their extensive experience to help troubleshoot technical questions and to support your setup.

The Niche Academy platform lets you create course-specific tutorial experiences with a small fraction of the effort, and the library tutorial marketplace lets you select, adapt, and customize material for your own library to continually offer fresh training options.

Price: Subscriptions starting at just $1,200.

Timeframe: Academy setup takes less than 2 hours.

Niche Academy is for academic librarians who want to contribute to student success.

Dramatically increase the number of online presentations you can report

Obtain measurable evidence of the library’s contribution to student success

Deploy precious staff resources more effectively and serve more students without increasing the burden on staff

Strengthen the library’s position as a dynamic, highly professional, and indispensable resource within the broader institution