ATG Interviews Jared Oates Co-Founder and COO of Niche Academy By Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu> and Katina Strauch (Editor, Against the Grain) <kstrauch@comcast.net> ATG: Jared, for those of our readers who might be unaware, can you tell us what Niche Academy is all about? JO: Sure, Niche Academy is a learning management system that delivers training for very specific audiences. We create training packages that include a delivery platform so that learners can immediately begin to use the training where and when they need it. In the context of academic libraries, we’ve created high-quality info lit instruction and database introductions with a student audience in mind. The Niche Academy platform lets academic librarians customize this training and deliver it as an assignment in the campus LMS, or embedded in the library’s website, or within a LibGuides page, or even right inside an EBSCO discovery interface, for example. Wherever it’s delivered, the teaching librarian retains the ability to interact with student learners and report on learning outcomes. Having solid evidence of learning outcomes helps those librarians highlight their direct contributions to student success. ATG: What level of input do librarians have in customizing the final instruction package? Do they play an active role in helping create the instruction? If so, how? JO: Librarians have full control of the final instruction package. They choose which training to present and how to organize it. They can customize the tutorials Niche Academy provides by inserting their own training elements like lessons, quizzes, and activities. They can also copy and adapt the training Niche Academy provides so it always feels like it’s coming from a local librarian. Both the Niche Academy platform and the training are completely white labeled, so it always feels local. We’ve also taken pains to keep the platform clean and simple so there’s very little learning curve involved in creating your own training. Librarian input and feedback are also the primary driver behind the training Niche Academy creates. Our content development queue is prioritized based on requests from our customers. ATG: Although you now work with numerous academic libraries, we understand that Niche Academy started working with public libraries. Can you tell us about those initial efforts? JO: Niche Academy’s founder, Jeromy Wilson, and I had both worked with libraries at SirsiDynix for many years. Our idea spark with public libraries began with a frustration we heard at almost every library we visited: they were spending a lot of money on eResources, but usage of those resources was disappointing. As we studied the problem, we realized that usage was low because public awareness was low and there were also technical barriers patrons consistently encountered. We experimented with social media tools and signage solutions that didn’t move the needle much on the awareness problem,
Against the Grain / February 2022
but finally found two things that really made a difference: 1.
Training all public facing staff, not just a few eResource “experts,” how to introduce people to the eResources and match the resources with patron needs and interests.
2.
Embedding appealing intro videos right within the library website.
For the technical barriers, the most impactful solution we found was to offer always-available video tutorials in obvious places on the website and then keep those tutorials up to date. The tutorials needed to give people enough information to have a satisfying first experience with the resource. A good first experience makes it likely they’ll come back. I think the eResource problem helped us see how the combination of a learning delivery platform with training content for a specific audience can solve real-world problems. We’ve been pleased with the results. We’ve seen libraries struggle with marketing and promotion efforts for years only to see marginal single digit percentage point gains in usage. We’ve seen those same libraries begin using the Niche Academy process and realize 70% overall usage gains in their first year. So that’s how we started with public libraries. As time has gone on, we’ve added a lot of professional development for librarians. Lots of libraries also use the platform now to deliver storytimes and other programs online. But we started with eResources. ATG: What gave you the inspiration to expand your offerings to academic libraries? In what ways did you see Niche Academy enhancing academic library instruction? JO: It started in a similar way with a pervasive problem we saw as we listened to academic librarians: job security and job satisfaction seemed to be on the decline. The most common issues behind the decline seemed to be budget cuts and increased workload occasioned by departing colleagues. Credentialed librarians are being asked to wear more hats and it’s often hard to communicate the value of their work. We saw that we could save time for library instructors by creating ready-made tutorials on core information literacy topics as well as regularly maintained introductions to research databases. Using the Niche Academy platform to deliver that instruction, librarians can then spend a greater portion of their time actually giving feedback to individual students. They also have better measures of learning outcomes, which make it easier to communicate their contribution to student success. They can show, for example, how students in a specific class now demonstrate mastery of concepts like “causation vs. correlation,” or skills like how to use appropriate in-text citations.
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