Niche Academy provides student-facing tutorials that teach information literacy, how to use specific research databases, and much more.
A Niche Academy subscription includes access to hundreds of ready-to-use tutorials for library-driven instruction. Here's a small sample:
Part of our "Research Essentials" series for teaching Information Literacy to new students.
Intro to some of the freely available tools for generating MLA, APA, and other citations in just a few clicks.
How to use both the Basic and the Advanced search functionality in Gale databases.
Intro to using EBSCOhost, a collection of reference databases, digital archives, online journals and eBooks.
How to use this large collection of scholarly articles, trade publications, and dissertations.
How to incorporate other writers' ideas into your own work without using direct quotes.
Whether they're using Niche Academy tutorials on a mobile device or embedded in the library website, the only branding students will ever see is yours.
Niche Academy tutorials look and feel like they come from your library, and because they're so easy to customize, they often do. Why create your library instruction from scratch when you can simply tweak a Niche Academy tutorial to match your unique needs?
If it feels like a teaching librarian's dream, it's because that's where the idea came from.
Many university instructors need their students to understand the essentials of information literacy, but don't want to spend class time covering it. With Niche Academy the library can give faculty an easy way to add library and information literacy instruction right into a course syllabus.
Maybe it's a tutorial about finding the right research source material. Maybe it's an introduction to a subject-specific database. Whatever the specific context, Niche Academy makes it easy for the library to deliver critical instruction that gets to the heart of the mission of the institution.
When you want to create your own in-house tutorials, Niche Academy lets you get more people involved. The tool is simple enough that it really doesn't require specialized training. Anyone that can use a word processor can create a tutorial. And you still have the power to create quizzes and interactive activities.
The interface is clean enough that you can actually toggle between learner view and the editing view.
