**4. Background**

The instructors who teach LIBR 1100 participate as team members in the process of continuously discovering student needs and expectations and improving the course's content, teaching, and learning. This team effort has evolved over the years into a structured yearly cycle of planning, developing, marketing, implementing, assessing, and improving all aspects of the course. The data collected from the various assessment methods play an important role in the process. The instructors recently started using the seven stages of Megan Oakleaf's (2009) instruction assessment cycle as a resource to assist in improving their process. These stages include reviewing learning goals, identifying learning outcomes, creating learning activities, enacting learning activities, gathering data to check learning, interpreting data, and enacting decisions (Oakleaf, 2009, pp. 541-545). The stages are incorporated into the process when and where feasible. In the near future, Blackboard Learn, the assessment module in Blackboard, will be used to track students enrolled in LIBR 1100 and will facilitate accurate reporting of the Library's impact on the learning and teaching that takes place at Texas Tech University (Oakleaf, 2011, pp. 76-77).
