Case study 3 – Library Essentials course

The client:
Course coordinators for the first-year course The Enquiring Mind, a foundation course within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Adelaide.

The task:
Support first-year Arts students by:

• providing students with the necessary skills to find, evaluate and use information sources
• encouraging them to think more critically about the process of working with information sources

Background:
As a foundation course, The Enquiring Mind is compulsory for all students undertaking an Arts degree. The University Library’s involvement in the course consisted of face-to-face sessions on information literacy delivered by the liaison librarians to students at the beginning of semester. However, this model was proving unsustainable due to the high enrolment numbers and reduced number of library staff, so we decided to make the course online instead. This had the added advantage of more flexible delivery at point of need.

The process:
We created a working group consisting of the two course coordinators, the Arts liaison librarians and the Library Learning Coordinator (which was my role at the time). We wanted to involve students in the design process but unfortunately we weren’t able to do this as they were on summer break.

Together we worked through a backwards design process to identify measurable learning outcomes. As a foundation course, the coordinators were particularly keen that students learn skills that would not only be useful in their Arts degrees but would also be beneficial in the wider employability context. The activities that we designed therefore had more of a digital capabilities focus than the traditional information literacy instruction, and were divided into 5 sub-sections:

• Finding & accessing information
• Analysing & evaluating information
• Managing information
• Acknowledging information sources
• Presenting information

We designed the course in such a way that it could be completed by students working independently or used as part of a blended learning approach to complement face-to-face activities in class.

We used Articulate Storyline 3 to create interactive elements and Camtasia Studio to create video content. In order to measure the effectiveness of the learning outcomes we created an assessment worksheet that complemented the major course assignment, a project called SA Futures where students had to work in groups to research and present on a topic related to South Australia.

The outcome:
The course coordinators and tutors felt that the course was very helpful and a useful learning resource. There was also considerable interest from academics in other faculties after demonstrations from their liaison librarians, as a result of which we decided to create a version of the course that could be used more widely. We were able to take advantage of a newly formed Students-as-Parters arrangement to get student involvement into the course design. The students also praised the content but made suggestions about the design and presentation that we were able to incorporate into later versions of the course.