Don't Teach Search, Teach Learning: How SMU Embraced Consensus
Megan Heuer is Director of Educational Initiatives at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Library in Dallas, Texas. She shares her journey with the SMU library adopting Consensus.
Ask an academic librarian what they actually spend their instruction time on, and you'll hear some version of the same answer: teaching students to fight with databases. Boolean operators, search strings, controlled vocabulary. Megan Heuer, a library director at SMU, put it more honestly than most: "We're always trying to teach people to think like a computer."
She'd watched students get overwhelmed by the mechanics of retrieval before they ever got to the ideas. And she'd arrived at an uncomfortable conclusion: "Only librarians care about search." Students don't. They want to find what they need and get on with the actual thinking.
So Megan and her colleagues brought Consensus to campus to stop making search the bottleneck. "I just brought the dartboard closer so they can think a little bit more about what's actually relevant, because they're less overwhelmed by everything else," she says.
It's been especially useful for early-stage researchers. Instead of drowning in search syntax, students can map a broad topic, see scholarship as an ongoing conversation, and pull up counter-arguments, something Megan calls nearly "impossible" in traditional databases. "It just gets students to things that might be relevant for them way faster," getting them to "potentially usable" material immediately.
In fact, for newer researchers, SMU is quietly retiring the old playbook altogether. Legacy database instruction is disappearing from the early-career curriculum. "For our earlier career college students, we're moving more and more away from even doing that — like, all you need is Consensus (for scholarly search)" Megan says.
The numbers back her up. In one year, SMU hit nearly 2,000 signups, at a school of roughly 10,000 students, that's a meaningful chunk of campus. Consensus has been adopted almost entirely through faculty buy-in and a train-the-trainer model where professors who love the tool spread it to their peers. And they're not just running searches: SMU users have clicked through to papers more than 30,000 times – much of it content SMU's library already licenses.
But the stat Megan cares about most isn't a stat. It's what her instruction time looks like now. When search takes minutes instead of a class period, faculty get to teach the things that actually matter. "In making search easier and making that a thing we can whip through, we can get to bigger fish to fry," she says. "We can get to the evaluation, the relevancy, the thinking about your topic, the how to think about information."
That's the whole thesis. Don't teach search, teach learning. When finding information gets easy, understanding it gets the time it deserves. SMU is proving it works.
But the stat Megan cares about most isn't a stat. It's what her instruction time looks like now. When search takes minutes instead of a class period, faculty get to teach the things that actually matter. "In making search easier and making that a thing we can whip through, we can get to bigger fish to fry," she says. "We can get to the evaluation, the relevancy, the thinking about your topic, the how to think about information."
That's the whole thesis. Don't teach search, teach learning. When finding information gets easy, understanding it gets the time it deserves. SMU is proving it works.
