By Amani Hassan and Hanisha Mistry

Staff at the Centre for Learning Strategies Support take pride in the resource library which offers PDF documents on various topics designed to support academic success and help students adapt to university-level learning. Accessing this library involves three straightforward steps:

“Student Life Homepage > Departments > Centre for Learning Strategy Support > Resource Library.”

While this navigation seems simple, the PDFs often contain embedded links to additional handouts, creating an overwhelming cycle of resources with little guidance on their relevance to individual student needs. A student could easily become confused and begin to doubt their own capacity to navigate all the “help” offered to them. Moreover, the library’s design may not cater to students with disabilities or limited digital literacy, raising concerns about its accessibility and equity. This raises the question of whether the resources on the Student Life website are effectively utilized—or utilized at all—without staff support.  

How do students actually experience SL digital information?

Leaders of student clubs often need to refer to the SL website. A few leaders we interviewed reported to us that they found navigating their required club documents online difficult, and had more luck asking others directly at union meetings or by emailing someone ‘in charge’. If this is the case for a handful of students, it may be the case for others among the significant population of students who are directed to such ‘resource libraries’ for their needs. So could the Student Life website be improved?

In a meeting with a coordinator within the Clubs and Leadership department, we discovered that at staff members have long understood the problem of too much redirection. One staff member proposed to solve the problem through centralization: create a single page where all student group leaders could access important information and resources. Yet, it seems this is exactly what the resource libraries for both CLSS and Clubs and Development currently aim to do: create a single page filled with some information and a lot of  redirection as one link almost always leads to another. Another solution could be to concentrate information, but it presents another problem: too much all at once. This problem seems to be already understood by Student Life staff in the context of ‘email blasts’ wherein scheduled emails describing multiple events and opportunities from various departments overwhelm the target audience.

If multiple issues of access arise when SL attempts to provide the bulk of important information to students through online avenues, and students seem to feel more at ease when given information directly by another person, SL might instead benefit from considering a more ‘human’ approach. While SL staff members have often correctly stated that providing resources online is in part, a response to concerns about accessibility for those who cannot meet in person, it could also be that a lack of face-to-face interaction paired with an over-reliance on providing digital access creates a new set of problems that SL must now address.