In 2021, Curtin Library consolidated its online help offerings with the launch of the UniSkills platform. It sought to be a one-stop destination for skills development; a place where students could build their skills in searching, evaluating, academic writing, maths, statistics and much more.
The platform solved a lot of problems but created new ones. How could students discover what they needed most amongst all the different options? What if they weren’t even sure what they needed?
Enter the diagnostic quiz.
Devised and produced by a small team of Library staff, this quiz was specifically designed to guide students to the best UniSkills resources for their study needs. A link to the quiz now features prominently on the homepage, and has been well used by visitors to the site since its launch towards the end of 2021.
A key priority when creating the quiz was to ensure it wasn’t overly long or cumbersome for users to navigate, and the team thought carefully about how to provide the most relevant information using the least amount of questions. The end result is a quiz that first prompts users to select from a list of skills they would like to improve, before presenting them with a small number of statements to choose from in relation to their selections – although only when necessary in order to provide the most accurate results.
Users are then provided with a list of the academic and study support guides that are most relevant to them, presented as a series of links. They are also able to download a PDF of the information so that they can refer back to it at a later time, or alternatively they can re-take the quiz again if they wish.
The quiz was created in the online survey tool Qualtrics, but has been designed to have a look and feel consistent with the UniSkills site. Users are also able to navigate easily between the two, ensuring that the quiz is very much a part of the UniSkills one-stop destination. Both the quiz and the site are freely available not only for Curtin staff and students, but for the wider community.
Written by Claire Hulcup, Academic Skills Advisor (Numeracy), Claire Murphy, Manager Learning Success and Rosalind Dunning, Librarian.
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