368 Poster Presentations
Information Literacy Online
An Erasmus+ Project to Improve Students’ Competencies
Stefan Dreisiebner
University of Graz, Austria stefan.dreisiebner@uni-graz.at Keywords: information literacy; MOOC; education projects
1 Motivation and background
Information Literacy (IL) is “the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning” (American Library Association, 2016). IL as a social key competence is particularly essential in post-secondary education and research. According to many studies (e.g. Katz 2007; Rubinić et al., 2013), student’s information literacy levels are generally low. Analyses show the need for an attractive tutorial which can be devel- oped on a broad basis of available material. Accordingly, in November 2016 the EU project ILO was started with the aim to develop, evaluate and dis- seminate a multilingual Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for develop- ing information literacy focusing on higher education students.
In: M.Gäde/V.Trkulja/V.Petras (Eds.): Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same? Understanding Information Spaces. Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium of Information Science (ISI2017), Berlin, 13th—15th March 2017.
Glückstadt:VerlagWernerHülsbusch, pp. 368—370.
Information Literacy Online 369
2 Expected outcome
MOOCs are online courses with no entry barriers aiming at unlimited par- ticipation. The ILO project will at first concentrate on information literacy elements which are relevant for all subjects/disciplines. Examples for such general information literacy elements are Boolean operators, basic principles in knowledge organization, or basic knowledge of copyright law. IL also covers subject-specific elements, so the project will demonstrate the applica- bility of the generic information literacy MOOC to two exemplary disci- plines: Business Administration and Psychology.
A major shortcoming of current IL courses is the lack of self-assessment components. Therefore, a central innovative approach of our MOOC will be the implementation of technology based assessment components which allow students to get feedback on their learning success. The MOOC content will be developed for six European cultural and language groups: English, Ger- man, Spanish, Catalan, Slovenian and Croatian. The multilingual approach will not only consider formal translation but also cultural-specific differences in the various realizations. The project will strongly endeavor to evaluate the MOOC in several phases and with different methods.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the project team members Christian Schlögl (University of Graz), Thomas Mandl (University of Hildesheim), Alexander Botte (German Institute for Educational Research and Educational Information), Maja Žumer and Tanja Merčun Kariž (University of Ljubljana), Franjo Pehar, Ivanka Stričević and Mate Juric (University of Zadar), Lyn Robinson (City, Uni- versity of London), and Ángel Borrego (University of Barcelona) for preparing the presented project concept.
The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
370 Poster Presentations
References
American Library Association, ACRL Board (2016): Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Chicago, ALA. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/
ilframework
Katz, R. I. (2007): Testing Information Literacy in Digital Environments: ETS’s iSkills Assessment. In: Information Technology and Libraries, 26 (3), 3–12.
http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ital/article/viewFile/3271/2884
Rubinić, D., I. Stričević and J. Mate (2013): Information Literacy Course – The Perception of Students and Professors: University of Zadar Case. In: Kurbanoğlu Serap et al. (Eds.): Worldwide Commonalities and Challenges in Information Lit- eracy Research and Practice: European Conference on Information Literacy, ECIL 2013, Istanbul, Turkey, October 22–25, 2013, Revised Selected Papers (pp.
528–534). Cham et al.: Springer International Publishing. http://goo.gl/oa4F1C
