Reach More Students & Measure Librarian Impact 

With Niche Academy, the Learning System Made for Academic Libraries

Increase librarian impact, connect with students, and build relationships with faculty using the learning solution designed with academic librarians in mind. 

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Trusted by 1700+ Library Systems

Meet the Solution Designed with Academic Libraries in Mind 

Extend the reach and scope of instruction, build faculty alliances, and measure librarian impact (without creating extra work) using Niche Academy’s ready-to-use and customizable tutorials, quizzes, and learner reports.

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Take Library Instruction to the Next Level  

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Learner Reports

Measure your impact on student success and show administrators your value. Our platform helps you track student performance and engagement through learner reports that show a complete picture of each learner's progress. 

Through interactive tutorials and quizzes, you can analyze student proficiency and finally gain insight into learning outcomes. 

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Expertly Crafted
Content Library

Find and share the content you don’t have time to create using our comprehensive library of high-quality tutorials. We cover topics ranging from critical thinking to core research skills. 

Our courses incorporate text, video, images, and more to ensure every student benefits from easily accessible, quality learning experiences. 

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Interactive Learning Elements  

Keep students on your library’s website by making learning easy and engaging. Our interactive, trackable elements capture students’ attention and give librarians insight into how students approach assignments—while our widgets integrate seamlessly into your library’s LMS and put quality educational content at students’ fingertips. 

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Consistent Training for Student Employees

Train employees–including your valuable student employees–on core topics like library ethics, professional communication, and customer service.

Our platform makes it easy to assign and track training for new employees. And even if your student workforce isn’t consistent, our trainings are, ensuring that each semester all employees are learning the same thing in the same way.  

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Trustworthy, Engaging, and Jargon-Free Library Tutorials  

A lack of critical thinking and research skills can negatively affect learning in any discipline. Help students learn to recognize reliable sources, discover and use library resources like scholarly databases from EBSCO, Gale, ProQuest, and more with our professionally designed tutorials.  

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Time-Saving Tools 

Focus your efforts and become more effective at the things that matter most with simple tools for creating customized training as well as access to the latest professional development on topics like building relationships with faculty. 

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Niche Academy Helps Academic Librarians
Overcome Your Biggest Challenges 

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You can’t always cover information literacy topics effectively in the amount of time you’re given to do it.

Gain extra time to focus on other tasks by using Niche Academy’s library of easily accessible, expertly-crafted tutorials—instead of creating content from scratch.

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False or misleading information can leave students vulnerable, confused, and unsure of which sources to trust.

Help students build confidence and resilience with tutorials from the Niche Academy marketplace that introduce information literacy, critical thinking, and research skills.

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If you are being asked to do more with less, it can be hard to give any role your full attention and make a difference.

Use Niche Academy to help your entire team reach their full potential, be their most efficient selves, and have a positive impact on students.

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It can be hard to collect data and measure your impact to show leadership how you help students succeed.

Increase student engagement and analyze their proficiency using Niche Academy’s interactive features and reports—so you can finally measure and report on your impact.

Get Started in 3 Steps!

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Set up a free trial of the Niche Academy platform.

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Pick the training that’s best for you and customize it as you choose.

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Let Niche go to work for you, building staff confidence and improving learner outcomes.

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We switched to Niche Academy for both the easy to use tutorial creation tool for asynchronous education, and also for the access to the Niche Academy Library, which represented a lot of ready to use tutorials we could pull down into our own environment and customize for our needs.

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Joe Riggie, Head of Information, SUNY Buffalo State

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I fell in love with this product when I saw the first demo and led the push for our library to switch to Niche Academy for our instructional needs. The more we use it, the more I love it.

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Naomi Tran, Circulation Services, Texas State Technical College

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Try Niche Academy
For Yourself 

Start a free 30-day trial to access a full-featured academy, including the tutorial marketplace, custom tutorial creation, and more. You'll be able to invite colleagues to review the academy and play around with our high-impact interface and see how it can work for you.
No payment necessary
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Boost Student Literacy & Keep Staff Happy 

Fill out the form to book your free demo and discover how to focus your efforts and increase your own measurable impact on student success. 
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FAQ

Do Niche Academy's tutorials align with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education?

Yes, you can see how our tutorials align with the six ACRL frameworks: ACRL Framework Map.

How is Niche Academy different from CREDO Info Lit - Core?

Both Niche Academy and Info Lit-Core accomplish some of the same things. Both products offer, for example, tutorials aligned with the ACRL frames that teach essential information literacy skills, integration with campus LMS systems like Canvas, robust reporting on usage and student progress, customization options that let you adapt instruction to the needs of your institution, metrics to demonstrate the impact of Info Lit instruction to other campus stakeholders, and compliance with accessibility and privacy requirements. 

The differences are based on fundamentally different business models. Infobase is a publisher that licenses content. Niche Academy is a software company whose revenue is tied to a simple platform subscription. As a result, you'll notice that Niche Academy offers: 

  • More shared community training resources available through the platform, including content created by other libraries and experts in the community. 
  • No additional charges based on which tutorials you use or how much you use them. 
  • More attention to the quality of the user experience for learners, instructors, and content creators. It's easier to create and customize training on the platform. It's easier to find and generate reports. 
  • More options for interactive instruction with Niche Academy including activities, open-ended response prompts, polls, etc. It is a fully baked LMS in its own right. In fact, staff training is a primary use case for most of our customers, and you'll find lots of professional development instruction available on the platform. 
  • More ways to embed tutorial experiences within websites and online tools like LibGuides. 

How is Niche Academy different from LibGuides?

LibGuides is a library-oriented Content Management System that is used to present information and count the number of views.  

Niche Academy is a library-oriented learning management system that is used to create interactive tutorials and measure learning outcomes. Niche Academy lets you provide feedback to individual learners and offer library instruction directly within the campus LMS. 

Niche Academy customers will often embed tutorials within LibGuides to enrich the information presented there. Niche Academy offers a number of visually appealing embed options for this use case. 

What does Niche Academy offer beyond what an LMS like Canvas does?

Niche Academy and Canvas are both learning management systems (LMS) that allow instructors to create training and track learner progress, but Niche Academy offers additional advantages for academic libraries that are already using Canvas or another LMS as the main campus system including: 

  • A large collection of ready-made, professional quality tutorials teaching essential research skills, information literacy concepts, and introductions to academic databases. 
  • The ability for teaching faculty in any department to add tutorials created in Niche Academy as assignments to any existing course and allow a librarian to directly interact with students and evaluate learning outcomes, even if they don't have access to the full course. 
  • A much simpler interface for creating tutorials. 
  • Learner reports that provide direct evidence of student learning outcomes. 
  • The ability to add database introductions to research-inclusive courses to significantly increase usage of library research databases. 

Are accessibility features available?

Yes. Niche Academy is compliant with the WCAG 2.1 standard at the AA level. This is something we work hard to maintain as we continuously update the platform.  

If you spot anything that’s slipped through our testing, please let us know. A thorough enumeration of our compliance level is available in the Niche Academy Accessibility Conformance Report.

Are we limited to a certain number of training and support hours?

No. A Niche Academy subscription includes unlimited professional support.

What maintenance and support is included with a Niche Academy subscription?

Niche Academy provides live technical support during business hours. There is no additional charge levied for Niche Academy support and there are no support tiers. Small customers get the same thoughtful attention as everyone else.   

All aspects of initial onboarding are included in the Niche Academy support offering including: 

  • The creation of customer academies and initial population of appropriate tutorials from the Niche Academy marketplace. 
  • Basic configuration of tutorials within each customer academy including invitation of learners, the addition of custom links, and showing or hiding available tutorial elements appropriately for the intended audience. 
  • The implementation of LTI integration with your campus LMS. 
  • Live training calls with all customer staff that need to learn how to use Niche Academy. 

What’s the process for reaching Niche Academy support?

Niche Academy support specialists can be reached by phone, by email, or through questions submitted within the platform itself. In addition to the live support, Niche Academy provides a searchable knowledge base and a collection of self-paced help tutorials covering basic administrative tasks and the process for tutorial creation.

Will this tool replace me?

If the security of your job is enhanced by measuring the direct value you provide, Niche Academy will help, not hurt. You'll be able to deliver more training and richer library learning experiences because the Niche Academy tutorial marketplace means you don't have to create training from scratch. You'll have more opportunities for direct interaction with learners. Niche will also make it easy for you to deliver reports on instructional outcomes.

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