Category A - Excellent Teaching Innovation

Miss Stephanie Allen - Library

Information Literacy Resource (ILR) for University of Liverpool Online (Laureate) Students

Miss Stephanie Allen is the Laureate Online Librarian working with the University’s online, part time, distance learning masters students. She provides an enquiry service throughout the day via email, the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) chat facility and telephone and students contact her directly or are referred via their instructors to her.

She has created an online self-study Information Literacy Resource (ILR) in order to teach distance-learning, part-time, taught postgraduate students how to discover, evaluate and manage information effectively and to enhance the quality of their work for their masters degrees. It is available to all online MBA, MSc IT, MSc ISM and MPH students through the Laureate virtual learning environment (VLE). She uses appropriate technology and the environment of the Embanet VLE. The course is designed to be usable with low bandwidth connections because my users access the VLE from home and may be in a country with a poor IT infrastructure.

There are seven units. Each consists of a lecture, assignment and answers:

·  Unit 1: Defining your information need and understanding the sources available

·  Unit 2: Planning and constructing an effective search strategy

·  Unit 3: Using the Online Library resources to find information

·  Unit 4: Finding reliable, quality information using the Internet

·  Unit 5: Comparing and evaluating information from different sources

·  Unit 6: Finding information sources not available from the Online Library

·  Unit 7: Using the Harvard system to reference correctly and avoid plagiarism

For this group of distance learners who never visit the University, developing information skills is particularly important because, working on their own, on the internet, they are even more likely than full time, on-campus, students to follow a Google link to poor information and to have no one to alert them that they had headed the wrong way. Some of them have been out of traditional education for some time and really need advice on finding and using good quality sources. Many of the students work full time, so it is essential to develop their skills to find information quickly and efficiently and to evaluate its quality.

The University’s teaching and learning agenda recognises that developing students’ abilities to be effective users of information is vital. However before Stephanie created these learning materials, the online students had no access to teaching from the University on finding, evaluating and managing information for their studies.

So the need for teaching in this area of information literacy was vital. The challenge for Stephanie was to find a way of teaching information literacy to more than 2000 online students, based throughout the world. A self-study resource that can be accessed online from the VLE at any time was therefore the appropriate mechanism for teaching information skills to these students. She was available to any students needing further support and encouraged them throughout the resource to contact her.

Impact of work undertaken

The online students can now easily access a central resource in their VLE that will fulfil their information literacy needs. After successfully following the course, the master’s students should be able to meet the learning outcomes Stephanie identified at the start of the resource. These include:

·  Plan and construct an effective search strategy;

·  Identify what resources are available to them from the University of Liverpool Online Library;

·  Carry out a successful search in the main collections (data sources) in their subject;

·  Demonstrate an increase in the understanding about using the internet effectively to find information;

·  Compare, evaluate and prioritise information obtained from different sources;

·  Cite references using the Harvard system;

·  Recognise, understand and explain issues of copyright and plagiarism.

Scope for further development

The resource can be developed for other academic subject areas. The University has further plans for the expansion of distance learning and the Library will utilise this resource as a model for information literacy teaching online.

The Information Services Committee has endorsed the Library proposals to incorporate information literacy training into courses for full time students and this will draw on Stephanie’s teaching resource.

The online programmes are changing their VLE platform from Embanet to Blackboard and the ILR will be migrated to Blackboard and will be further developed using the additional interactive tools that Blackboard has available, such as, multiple choice quizzes.

Supporting evidence

The importance of the ILR within the online programmes has been recognised and the Laureate/University of Liverpool Academic Planning Group have agreed to endeavour to make the ILR a defined part of the programme of study to be completed by students after the end of their first module.

Records show that the very significant numbers of Laureate students have so far accessed the resource and Sue Green, Module Manager and Instructor for the MBA programme has received feedback that the ILR has impacted strongly on the programmes. Some quotations supporting this include:

‘The Information Literacy Resource materials have proved an invaluable resource in assisting with the teaching and facilitation of programmes and much praise has been voiced for them, by students and by staff’;

Cheryl Balm, Academic Staff Coordinator of the MBA programme recently took a look through the ILR materials in Embanet. She thought the materials, layout and instructions were great. ‘It’s beautifully laid out, very clear for students to work through, and informative. I think it will be a fantastic tool for them’.