Kiss Your Handouts Goodbye: LibGuides: Designing for Instruction

While this is certainly not an exhaustive list, it should give you an idea of the sorts of things that are out there for you to use in your guides.

Before you plunge into creating a guide, take some time to do some planning:

• Think about collaborating with faculty
  While you may or may not want to give faculty editing privileges, you certainly want to ask them for ideas about which courses they feel could benefit most, which resources they emphasize in their courses, how best to 'market' the guides, etc.
• Standardization is something to decide early on, especially if there will be multiple editors
  Do you want all the guides to have the same general look and feel? What colors will you use? Do you want the guides to have the same basic pages? Will you have 'how to' guides and if so, what subject can you create that will be most descriptive? Will you have both subject and course guides and if so, will you use the same format for the course guide titles?
• Use your classroom instruction sessions as outlines for your guide
  Think through the flow of your instruction sessions. What do you always include? What is more course-specific? Take a look at the graphic below for an example of this. 

• Think about the handouts you use and incorporate them into a guide, or create new ones from them
  The idea here is to be as paperless as possible, and to have a somewhat permanent resource for students when they lose your handouts.
• For course guides, gather the syllabi for the courses and mine them for resources
  Besides helping you create a better guide, this will go a long way in helping you market your guides (i.e. faculty might include links to your guides in their future syllabi, or encourage students to use your guide).
• Consider the fact that your guide may be your only way to get into the classroom
  Most of us know faculty who don't think they can spare a single moment of 'content' time for you to come in and show students how to be effective researchers (though, I would argue that knowing how to do research in a particular field IS content). Think about how to create your guide as if it were your only contact with students for a particular course or subject.