UW Libraries Blog

March 20, 2020

Moving to Online Learning: Top 5 Resources For Faculty

UW Libraries

The UW Libraries is committed to supporting UW students, staff, and faculty to prepare for online teaching and research in Spring 2020.  We are continually evaluating our services and working with partners across the university to support faculty during this time of significant change. Please see also our LIBRARIES RESOURCES FOR REMOTE LEARNING page, accessible through on our main COVID-19 page. This page provides a centralized resource for finding tools and support for both students and faculty.

In addition to many remote resources that we routinely provide, we are working on some additional ways to adapt and respond to a remote teaching and learning environment.  With the abundance of the information being shared, we want to make it easy for you to find what you need from the Libraries.

Our top 5 resources to help support a transition to remote teaching and research:

1. Research Guides  Librarian-curated “Research Guides” provide links to subject specific journal databases, ebooks and more.

2. Our Librarians:

    • Chat with a librarian 24/7! This service is staffed by UW Librarians but at peak service times or off-hours you may be chatting with a librarian from another academic library.

3. E-Resources for your class. We are expanding purchasing of e-resources to support remote teaching. When requested and available we will be purchasing multi-user e-books and removing restrictions on duplicating print reserve items. Check-out our ebooks guide here. Before you make course reserve requests, a few important things to note:

    • Not all resources are available to purchase for online,  educational or classroom use.
    • With Libraries buildings closed, students will be unable to borrow physical copies of library course reserve textbooks — a challenge especially for those who are unable to afford the expense. Traditionally, textbook publishers do not sell e-books to libraries, but check out our Resources for Remote Learning -Online Resources for Teaching to see what you can do — and how the library can help.
    • You may want to explore alternatives like Open Educational Resources (freely available, openly licensed materials) for use in your course. Use the search tools available on our guides UW Seattle OER Guide , UW Bothell OER Guide , UW Tacoma OER Guide to find existing open textbooks or create and publish your own open resources for your course.  Curious about creating or revising existing OER?  Sign up for spring quarter Pressbooks workshops (there is one happening next week!) https://tinyurl.com/uwpressbooks

4) Streaming Video: The Libraries already provides access to thousands of streaming videos that you can use to support online learning. We are also expanding purchasing of streaming media as much as possible including strategies to expand the corpus of films, documentaries, and other streaming media available to faculty to use in their classes.

5) Libraries in Canvas.  The Libraries supports instructors using Canvas in many ways, including a “UW Libraries” page which can be added to the navigation of any Canvas course. For more customized content or assistance, instructors can add a Subject Librarian to their course using the “Librarian” Canvas role. The Libraries also provides instructors with research-specific course content via the Canvas Commons repository.

Other Important Things to Know:

Can’t remember it all? Don’t worry! All of these resources and more can be easily found on our LIBRARIES RESOURCES FOR REMOTE LEARNING web page.

Thank you for your patience and support as we navigate these unusual circumstances, and please continue to share your ideas and questions by contacting us here. 

#YourLibrary – We are here to help!