Flipped Classroom: Curation

It’s March, and this month we’re focusing on creating organized collections of ebooks and audiobooks for students via Curation. We touched on this topic a bit back in January’s Advantage and Sora Features Flipped Classroom, but now it’s time to get into the deep and dirty of it all!

What is Curation?

Just like with your physical library collection, you have the ability to group, highlight, and promote digital titles that have a similar theme or genre to your students through curated collections in Sora, which become visible to students on the Sora Explore page.

As a member of WSDLC, you have a choice in what your student’s see on the Sora Explore page. You can show the WSDLC curations, or create your own with Advantage (custom) Curation. Curations help students find books that interest them, and curations in the WSDLC are refreshed monthly.
Note: If your Advantage curation is turned on, students no longer see the regularly updated WSDLC curations.

Advantage Filtering
How to Check if Your School’s Advantage Curation is On or Off:

  1. Sign into OverDrive Marketplace.
  2. In the Curate drop-down, select Standard curation.
  3. Look at the “Customize Advantage collections” toggle:
    NO means your Advantage Curation is turned off, and students are viewing the WSDLC’s curations.
    YES means your Advantage Curation is turned on, and students are viewing your schools’/districts curations.
  4. If you’d like to update your settings, select the other option; then in the pop-up, click Save to confirm.

Note that if you change this setting back to No, you’ll lose any collections that you customized for Sora, and your collections will match the shared collection/consortium’s again.

If you want to update your individual Advantage curations: Click Here to access training resources on creating and publishing curations.

You can also watch this 3-minute video to watch a walkthrough on how to curate collections for Sora:

(Link to video: Curation Overview)

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Regardless of which curated collections your students are able to view, curations will honor content access levels. That is, if you’re creating a curated collection of New Audiobook Titles, you can toss all of your new Audiobook titles into that one curation; no need to create five different curations for each content access level; Sora will do that work for you, and will show your Early Elementary-assigned students only the titles that are meant for those students.

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OverDrive supports two types of collections that you can create:

Curated Collections: These collections are created by you, and are a hand-picked list of titles, usually with a common theme.

  • Follow current or seasonal trends, like a list of books that will soon be movies, titles about a hot political or social issue, or holiday-themed titles.
  • Build curated collections for one-time events, author- or series-based collections, and about topics that won’t be updated frequently.
  • Example curated collections for schools: Meet Someone New (biographies and memoirs), Once Upon a Time (fairy tales and folk tales), and Out of the Ordinary (sci-fi).
  • See recommended lists for schools created by OverDrive librarians to help build your collections.
Automated Collections: These collections are based on criteria that you set, such as format or subject, and help showcase your content more broadly and enhance browsing for your users. For example, a New Chinese Ebooks collection lets users easily see titles that fit all of those categories without needing to search or filter.

  • Automated collections refresh every 24 hours, so the content is always up-to-date.
  • To ensure dynamic collections, feature formats and subjects that continue to build.
  • Automated collections are broad in nature and work best with fairly simple criteria.
  • Examples of automated collections include New Romance Ebooks, Audiobook Thrillers, Available Now, New Spanish Titles, or Most Popular Audiobooks.

  • How To Utilize Curation

    As noted above, even if you have your Advantage Curation turned off, your students are still able to find content through the curations that the WSDLC’s Digital Content Specialist at OverDrive puts together. But if you’d like to include your own curations, or handpick the WSDLC’s curations, here are some how-tos, tips, tricks, and resources here to help you with that!

    This short demo of Advantage account curation within WSDLC is from 2019, so while it’s a little dated, it still provides an accurate overview of how WSDLC member districts and schools can create their own curations.

    OverDrive also has three different curation-related self-paced modules:

    Create and publish a curated collection

    Learn to create hand-picked lists to share with your students

    Open Module

    Create & publish an automated collection

    Learn to create automated lists to share with your students

    Open Module

    Edit and rearrange collections

    Learn to edit and change the order of collections for the Sora app.

    Open Module

     

    Additionally, OverDrive’s Marketplace Help has a wonderful step-by-step procedure on how to publish collections in Sora. In fact, you can find a treasure trove of information, how-tos, and walkthroughs from the Curation Marketplace Help page. Everything you could ever need is there, organized in a helpful Q&A format.

     

    This brings us to the end of another flipped classroom training session! Want to talk with an OverDrive expert about your curation needs?  Schedule a one-on-one session!  Contact wsdlc@overdrive.com to schedule your 20 minute session.

    If you have questions specifically about the WSDLC consortium, you can contact wsdlc-info@wils.org.

    Join us again in April for our next, and final, Flipped Classroom topic: Usage Statistics!

    You can view the full year’s training plan and revisit previous Flipped Classrooms here: WSDLC Training Schedule