In October’s Flipped Classroom, we covered the basics of Advantage Accounts, and we followed that in November by focusing solely on the Purchasing aspect of Advantage Accounts. For December, we’re going to take a step back and widen the lens for a look at many of the other collection-based tools, resources, and best-practices available to WSDLC Members through their Advantage Accounts in OverDrive Marketplace with Advantage/Sora Features!
Before we really get rolling on the whys you should be logging in to OverDrive Marketplace, lets start with a brief recap on the whats:
OverDrive Marketplace is the online portal where you can
- View usage statistics and run reports for your district and/or school,
- Discover which Content Access Level(s) titles are available in,
- Purchase additional content that would be available for only your students, and
- Make the collections your own with features that allow customization and autonomy over content and data.
If you do not have a Marketplace Account, please reach out to wsdlc@overdrive.com.
Simply put, an Advantage Account is the school/district account that your Marketplace username is connected to. When you log in to Marketplace, you are connecting to your school’s unique settings, curation, and collection.
WSDLC member districts have the opportunity to setup a single Advantage Account for their enrolled schools, or each school can have their own unique Advantage Account.
Regardless of your setup, the features and tools covered in this month’s Flipped Classroom are at your disposal.
WSDLC Advantage Overview & How-Tos PDF
Making the Most of Your Advantage Account & Sora
Wisconsin K12 library staff are filling multiple roles in their district, so finding the time to do a deep-dive into a shared digital collection can be tough. To help WSDLC Members prioritize, we’re sharing the:
Top 5 Most Impactful Tools and Best-Practices
1. Usage Statistics
With the Insights tool within Marketplace, schools can see how often students are checking out titles, which titles and formats are the most popular, and so much more. This information can be used in instances like helping library staff decide what to purchase, how to market to students, and can prove useful in getting stakeholder buy-in. You can find out more about how to run statistics for your school(s) in April’s Flipped Classroom: Usage Statistics.
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2. Advantage Filtering
This is a more-recent tool that OverDrive has developed (with many thanks to WSDLC Members requests!), and was implemented in April 2023. With Advantage Filtering, districts have more control over which consortium-owned books are available to their students. If there is a title in the shared collection that either doesn’t align with district policies, or is included in a collection leveled lower than fits a district, that school can choose to utilize Advantage Filtering to remove access to that title without affecting the full consortium.
Watch this video from OverDrive’s Resource Center, Advantage filtering: Advantage collection user, to see this tool in action:
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3. Advantage Purchasing (via Marketplace and/or with Advantage Bundle Carts)
This topic was covered extensively last month, so we’re going to keep things short and sweet here.
Click here to jump back to November’s Flipped Classroom for a refresh and more details.
The long and short of it is: WSDLC Members can purchase content- ebooks, audiobooks, readalongs, comics, you name it- that would be available exclusively for students at their school(s). These purchases can be paid for with content credit (essentially a deposit account that can be refilled at any time) or by invoice. And if a district/school would choose to leave the WSDLC for any reason, Advantage purchases would continue to remain with the district and available to their students. Advantage users can log into Marketplace and build their own carts and make their purchases; or the WSDLC also offers a variety of Advantage Bundle Carts throughout the year.
What are Advantage Bundle Carts?
If building up your school’s Advantage offerings in Sora is something that always gets set aside for another time, the WSDLC has your back! Every few months, the WSDLC’s dedicated Digital Content Specialist Librarian at OverDrive identifies the most popular, high-demand titles in the shared collection, and prepackages these titles into three different sets (based on Content Access Levels) that you can purchase for only your students just by completing a quick Google form! No thinking about how to best leverage your budget, and no logging in to OverDrive Marketplace. Just a simple, straightforward way to reduce your students’ wait times on the titles they want most.
And remember: OverDrive’s content credit never expires! If you’re getting close to the end of the budget year with some funds to spend, consider depositing your extra funds into your Marketplace account to provide more access to digital content for your students.
4. Collection Development: Identifying Popular Titles & Weeding Locally-Owned Titles
Part of the beauty of buying into a shared collection is that a lot of the collection development tasks are taken care of by the Project Managers and the dedicated WSDLC OverDrive Digital Content Specialist. (And it’s something that we love doing!)
However, districts should continue to monitor and manage their Advantage collections- those titles that schools have purchased for their own students- as well. From the OverDrive Resource Center comes a great self-paced module that specifically covers Advantage Collection Management. In this module, you can learn how to run a Holds report to see which titles are most popular with your students- information you can use to purchase additional copies of titles- and learn how to weed expired content that might be gaining holds that will go nowhere.
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5. Understanding Content Access Levels vs Audience Levels
We’ve all been there: a question comes from a student, teacher, or parent, and we need to check to see which of the five collections (Early Elementary; Upper Elementary; Middle School; Lower High School; Upper High School) a title is available in.
Our first reaction may be to search the title within Sora to find this information; after all, there is a wealth of title-specific information here. However, the information that displays on a title’s page within Sora is generated by the title’s metadata, which is supplied by the publisher and cannot be edited by OverDrive staff. While this information can be incredibly helpful in getting the right books to the right students, it does not [necessarily] tell us which collection the title is available in within the WSDLC or your own Advantage account. The best place for you to know exactly which collection(s) a title is available in is within your Marketplace account.
While it feels like the Audience Level descriptor in Sora would tell you which of the five collections a title would be available in, this won’t always be the case. The Audience Level tag is based on industry-standard subjects that publishers apply to books, and can lead to some inconsistencies for WSDLC leveling. For example, a publisher may tag a title as Young Adult if it is suitable for ages 12-18/grades 7-12, whereas the WSDLC assigns titles to the Middle School collection that are deemed suitable for ages 12-14/grades 6-8 (as recommended by trusted review sources). If a publisher designates a title as Young Adult, but review sources indicate it is recommended for ages 15+, the WSDLC will assign that title to the Lower High School collection instead.
It’s the Content Access Level assignment that you’ll find in a title’s Marketplace record that will tell you exactly which collection(s) it can be accessed from.
TL;DR- You can find out which collection(s) a title belongs to in its Marketplace record, not in its Sora record.
Becoming an Advantage Super-User
Are you ready to explore more of what is available to you in Marketplace and become an Advantage Super-User? Great! We know you have it in you!
Above we showed off the top five resources, tools, and to-dos that WSDLC Members should prioritize, but if you’re interested in ways to take the digital collections even further for your students, and you have the time to do so, there are so many more things you can do!
Curation
Curate collections to hook students in on the Explore page when they log in to Sora. The consortium has a series of curated collections that are updated monthly, but schools and districts can create their own curated collections as well!
In fact, Curation is such a hot topic and useful feature that it has its very own Flipped Classroom. March is the month that is dedicated to Curation, but it’s relevant and ready to be used year-round!
You can also review the Curate help article found in OverDrive’s Resource Center for more information and details.
Student Dashboard
This feature permits districts to tailor learning to their students on a more individual basis. Following industry best practices to protect student-level data and privacy, the Student Dashboard feature allows districts to better know their students’ reading levels and interests.
OverDrive’s Resource Center includes some incredibly helpful information on how Advantage Users can enable and utilize this feature:
🎥 Student Dashboard Overview (2:22 Video)
📄 Set up the Student Dashboard for Your Advantage Collection (PDF)
Shelf Talkers
This newest Sora feature allows media specialists to highlight individual titles in Sora to inspire and encourage students to check out a title and read. Want to dig deeper in to student engagement with WSDLC/Sora? Shelf Talkers are a great next step! Add shelf talkers to titles to spotlight recommendations, share trivia, quotes, and more.
(Shelf Talkers is an advantage-level feature; the consortium will not be using it.)
🎥 Watch the How-To Video from OverDrive: Add Shelf Talkers
Premium Reviews
Book reviews from trusted industry sources – like Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, School Library Journal, PW, and more – have always been available in Marketplace, but they’re now more easily found right in search results, title details, and advanced search! Use these to your advantage when you’re looking into purchasing new titles; or if you need to make adjustments to consortium-owned titles that may not quite fit in
Learn more about Premium Reviews in OverDrive’s Resource Center.
That brings us to the end of this month’s Flipped Classroom, and we’ll see you again in January for our next Flipped Classroom topic: Marketing and Training!
If you have any questions, or would just like to know more about getting started with OverDrive, we encourage you to schedule a 20-minute one-on-one session with OverDrive. Contact the WSDLC OverDrive team (wsdlc@overdrive.com) to schedule a session or ask a question.
If you have questions specifically about the WSDLC consortium, you can contact wsdlc-info@wils.org.
You can view the full year’s training plan and revisit previous Flipped Classrooms here: WSDLC Training Schedule