Accessit as a Learning and Marketing Tool to Increase Student Engagement

Gabrielle Mace is the Head of Library Services at St Augustine’s College in Sydney, Australia. The all-male school caters to Years 5 to 12 grade students. When she began her role at St Augustine’s, she knew that to change the schools’ LMS was a big decision and one that would require a good reason. The library had low patronage and most students had no idea how to use the existing Learning Management System to find a book. She had implemented Accessit Library at two other schools in her career, and she felt unequivocally that Accessit was the right tool because “it was the best for the students.”

Colorful and Easy to Use

Gabrielle states that her philosophy is that students are first. Accessit has the friendliest OPAC to navigate, and the tool is the most visual and easy to use. She describes the user interface as critically important.  Accessit was implemented in June 2023. There could not been an easier implementation. The team at Accessit provided exceptional value by extracting the old data and bringing it into the new system with no disruption in the school day. Younger students love the Visual Search tool to assist them in finding books, and older students can search by genre, age group, and even classroom.  And with the drag and drop functionality, it’s actually fun to use! A new teacher was once given the opportunity at St Augustine’s to navigate through Accessit – “You can’t break it,” Gabrielle told the new teacher. She was able to navigate quickly and found her way around with ease.

Accessit as a Marketing Tool

St Augustine’s has made full use of the Custom Dashboards, and Accessit is a marketing tool as well as a learning tool. By setting up custom dashboards, you can essentially create a web page by student year, classroom, curriculum component, or anything you can imagine. Using the dashboard site has an additional benefit. It exposes students to multiple topics or resources they may not have searched for on their own. The creative use of this feature has resulted in a huge increase in visits to the library, and checkouts for Years 10, 11, and 12 have increased substantially. St Augustine’s has several ways in which they utilize the dashboard including:

Seasonal and Thematic Displays

Aligning the dashboard themes with key events or seasons – such as Book Week, holidays, or upcoming exam periods. For example, Gabrielle featured a “Study Success” dashboard with links to research guides, curated collections of study tips, recommended reading lists, and micro lessons to assist students with referencing and academic writing. This encourages students to engage with resources they may not have explored otherwise.

Bringing Students Back to the OPAC Wherever Possible

Gabrielle recently hosted a Gamified Literacy Initiative and a Murder Mystery challenge, which took the students from a simple display in the library to inhabiting an online world where evidence was slowly drip fed and opportunities for multimodal learning were possible. This was only possible through the use of the custom dashboards in Accessit and the ability to load in video content from ClickView to deliver pieces of evidence over a long period of time.  Through newsletter pieces, parents were encouraged to join this initiative from home and work with their son to help solve the mystery.  This allowed parents to build familiarity with Accessit, and as a byproduct they became familiar with all the elements it offers.

Promoting New Arrivals and Events

When new books arrive, she features “New on the Shelves” or “Just Arrived” widgets that auto-refresh on the dashboard, keeping things exciting. Event promotion is another key – whether it’s a visiting author or library competitions, these widgets act as eye-catching reminders for students to get involved.  They are so highly visual and so easy to change up that Gabrielle makes changes to her custom dashboard every three or four days to keep the student experience fresh!

Parent Marketing

Gabrielle offers a screen recording for parents of students starting in Year 5 and Year 7 (the school’s two intake years).  With a voiceover guiding them, she takes parents through the OPAC and all its capabilities. Parents have given feedback that “it has been such an easy system to use, and everything for the library is in one place!”

Data-Driven Student Impact

The library at St Augustine’s has seen tangible benefits which can be seen through Accessit’s analytics. After the introduction of regular dashboard updates with targeted genres, they observed an increase in both borrowing rates and genre diversification. This has had a direct impact on fostering a love of reading among students, who are now more engaged in independent reading.

Gabrielle says, “Using Accessit in this way keeps the library experience fresh and relevant, which drives student interest and supports their academic and personal success. The flexibility of the platform allows us to adapt quickly to the needs of our community, making it a crucial part of our literacy strategy.”