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Making Use of Your LMS for 
Student Staff Training and Support
Jude Morrissey, Yale Divinity School

ABSTR ACT  Training and supporting student staff is a reiterative 
process that can run into several roadblocks that differ greatly from 
regular staff training and support - including creating work sched-
ules around class schedules, training student staff individually and 
comprehensively while making sure student staff really under-
stand processes, and making it easy to communicate (especially for 
switching shifts). This session covered some reasons why creating a 
student staff module inside your institution’s learning management 
system (LMS) is a good idea and showed various ways Yale Divinity 
Library is using Canvas to connect to student staff, taking attendees 
on a “tour” of the LMS course itself.  

When I took the position of Access Services Librarian at Yale Divinity 
Library in January 2020, I was excited to begin working on a project 
like one I had done at my previous institution: creating and imple-
menting a student staff training, management, and support course 
inside Yale’s learning management system (LMS). As luck would 
have it, the course was approved just before the COVID-19 pandemic 
forced Yale University Library to shut down services at physical loca-
tions and shift to remote-only work; it became an excellent tool for 
communicating with student staff in an emergency situation. 

There are several reasons why using your institution’s LMS for 
student staff training, management, and support is a good idea. Two 
of the most important are meeting student staff members where 
they are and accountability for everyone involved. The ways these 
reasons take shape in the course may vary; shared below are some 
examples from Yale Divinity Library’s current student staff course. 

MEETING STUDENT STAFF WHERE THEY ARE

When deciding how to train and manage your student staff, the best 
idea is to meet them where they are. They are not together, literally. 
During the pandemic, it was obvious that this was the case – student 



296  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

staff members left for Spring Break and were suddenly unable to 
return to campus. Scattered, they wondered what this meant for their 
positions at the library, what the library was planning for reopening, 
and how it would impact their work when they were allowed back 
on site. It was also an important outlet for them to talk to each other 
and us about how they were coping with the pandemic and with 
classes that were suddenly online. Even when things are normal, 
however, it is difficult to get student staff members all together at the 
same time in the same place. For regular staff, it may be possible to 
gather everyone hired at roughly the same time together for orienta-
tion and training, and they will work together often enough to know 
each other and form relationships that make working together on 
projects easier; moreover, their work has a high priority in their 
lives. Student staff, on the other hand, will need to prioritize classes 
and other school-related activities ahead of their positions, and their 
different class schedules will likely make it impossible to provide 
group orientation and training, much less working together on proj-
ects or knowing each other well enough to arrange for the inevitable 
schedule conflicts. 

They are also not together, figuratively. Student staff members 
learn at different speeds and in different ways. The ability to pres-
ent information in text allows students to move at their own pace 
through training and ask for a demonstration of those points they 
need to see. Some may want to sit down and complete all the train-
ing at once; others will want to break it up into multiple sessions. 
Returning student staff may need a quick refresher on some proce-
dures and notes on things that have changed, while new hires will 
need more in-depth training. They may also need accessibility tools, 
like braille downloads or text-to-speech readers, that are not neces-
sarily readily available in person or in other programs. 

All student staff members, however, are going to be online – specif-
ically, in the institution’s LMS. There are many online programs (chat, 
scheduling apps, wikis, etc.) that could be used for various compo-
nents of what you need for training, management, and support, but 
the LMS offers most, if not all, the components you need in one place, 
with various accessibility tools and strong privacy protections, too. 
In some cases, other programs do work better than tools included 
in the LMS – I tend to use Google Docs for scheduling sign-ups and 
Google Forms for quick surveys – but links to those tools can and 



Listen and Learn Sessions  297

should be included in the LMS for easy discovery. You want to keep 
everything as centrally located as possible. 

Student staff members will be in the LMS regularly for their 
classes, anyway – so you are not asking them to add yet another 
program or app to their lives. Moreover, student staff members 
are likely to be involved in online communities once they leave our 
institutions. Online communities were an important aspect of life 
during the pandemic and will likely remain so, especially for those 
going into academia and/or ministry. It is a good idea to get them 
thinking about how such communities operate and what can be 
done with them. 

ACCOUNTABILITY

One of the best reasons to use the LMS for student staff training, 
management, and support is to increase accountability for both 
yourself and your student staff members. Uniformity of the train-
ing process is an excellent advantage. As mentioned before, it can 
be impossible to get everyone together at one time to train them, so 
you generally end up doing a great deal of one-on-one training. That 
method, unfortunately, generally means you or the person you are 
working with at that moment are going to miss something, even 
when you have a checklist. You may emphasize one thing with one 
person and not another, or you may need to spend time answer-
ing questions about a particular procedure with someone and run 
short of time to cover everything. Individuals will also remember 
different things from their training sessions and will definitely need 
refreshers or updates along the way – so it is a good idea to have all 
the information written down and readily available, especially if 
you need to be away for a while. 

Quizzes are another excellent way to ensure accountability. You 
can see how your student staff members are doing individually and 
pick out specific information you need to cover with someone who 
perhaps is not understanding a particular area well. You can also 
see how you are doing with your presentation of the information. If 
several people are struggling with the same section, you know you 
need to revise it. 

Student staff input in the process is an important part of keeping 
you accountable in the creation and maintenance of the course, too. 
It is for them, after all, and they will have a good idea of what they 



298  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

need to know and how well the information is presented. When 
creating the course, I chose some of the student staff members who 
had been there longer than I had to take it for “test run” and make 
suggestions for additions or changes. I also used surveys of both new 
and returning students to assess the course’s perceived effectiveness 
and gather ideas for future versions. 

YALE DIVINITY LIBRARY’S STUDENT STAFF COURSE

Knowing why one ought to use the LMS is important. Figuring out 
how to use it to your library’s best advantage will depend on your 
student staff’s needs and the tools available in your institution’s LMS. 
Before you build your course, you need to arrange to have access to 
the LMS: find the individual or department responsible for assign-
ing LMS course access and request a course for library student staff 
training, management, and support. You should also inquire about 
training in how to use your institution’s LMS. In addition, you need 
to talk to your student staff members to determine what they need 
to know and the tools they think would be helpful. Yale University 
uses Canvas, but any LMS should have equivalents to the tools within 
this one. Yale Divinity Library’s Canvas course is primarily used in 
the following ways:

• Scheduling 
We use a Google Doc to allow student staff members to sign 
up for shifts during the weeks immediately before and imme-
diately after classes start (recognizing that class schedules 
frequently change in the first few weeks of the semester). 
During that time, a link to the document is included on the 
home page of the course. Once the schedule is set, a PDF version 
is transcluded on the home page for quick reference and can 
also be downloaded for individual use in case student staff 
members want a print copy. 

• Student Staff Training 
The largest part of the LMS course is devoted to student staff 
training. Assignments were created for different aspects of 
student staff work – e.g., circulation at the desk, scanning, and 
shelving. Because the training is broken up into many assign-
ments, student staff find it easier to go through them at their 
own pace. It also makes it easier for you to add new assign-



Listen and Learn Sessions  299

ments, as different duties are added to the position. If you have 
student staff in different areas – some in Access Services and 
others in Special Collections, for instance – you can create sepa-
rate modules with assignments specific to those groups. 

Each assignment ends with a quiz. The quizzes are not graded 
and do not have time limits; they can also be retaken as often as 
necessary. The correct answers are always shown, too. I always 
try to include some fun facts and funny answers.  

• Announcements 
Weekly notes and occasional reminders are always a good idea. 
Reminding student staff of holiday closures, upcoming projects, 
and changing procedures, or recognizing areas where work 
quality is slipping, for instance, require group communica-
tion – but you do not want your message lost in student staff’s 
email inboxes. Using the LMS for announcements keeps all your 
messages together, making them easier to find retroactively. 
Students staff members may opt to have announcements deliv-
ered to their email inboxes from the LMS, if they wish; but they 
will always know how to access messages from you without 
having to dig through their emails. 

• Discussion Boards 
Student staff members will frequently have questions about 
their work, and you may not be the only (or even the best) 
person who can provide an answer. You want to encourage 
them to talk to each other, and the discussion boards are a great 
place to do that. During the COVID-19 pandemic, our discussion 
boards were used for regular check-ins with student staff; we 
(and they) shared resources for mental health, tips for handling 
online classes, and more. Once on-site work became possible 
again, the discussion boards could be used for arranging to 
switch shifts – a student staff member who needed to change 
their schedule for just a day or two would post the opening to 
the appropriate discussion board, and another student staff 
member could respond in order to take the shift. This made 
scheduling much easier for me, as I did not have to act as an 
intermediary to find someone to cover shifts all the time. It also 
let student staff members switch shifts months in advance and 
kept everyone informed as to who would be working when. 

Project tracking is easier using the discussion boards, too. 
If you have a short-term project with only a few student staff 



300  AT L A 202 1 PROCEEDINGS

members assigned to it, a group and/or discussion board 
specific to that project can be set up. Those members can leave 
notes for each other on the LMS, share files, or ask questions 
asynchronously. 

Of course, student staff needs will change; so will policies and 
procedures. Learning management systems will continue to add 
new tools, too, I hope. The LMS course will need consistent revision 
and adaptation to changing contexts. 

CONCLUSION

Using your institution’s LMS can be a great way to train, manage, and 
support your student staff for several reasons, including meeting 
them where they are and holding them and yourself accountable. 
How you use your LMS course will depend on what tools are built 
into the system and what your student staff needs from the course. 
I hope the way Yale Divinity Library is using Canvas has given you 
some ideas and I encourage you to reach out to your LMS adminis-
trator to request access to a course of your own and the training to 
best use it. 


