This article is from the November 2002 issue of Update.

What have we learnt about information skills teaching in the past 20 years? We know that it has to be timely and relevant and engage the attention of the students. This has always been a challenge, but never more so than with the advent of the virtual learning environment.

Librarians in higher education are working with academic colleagues to enhance the student learning experience by creating resource-rich environments of quality-assessed materials. But in our rush to populate these new environments with information skills materials are we in danger of forgetting some of the tried and tested principles of information skills teaching? Many of the packages now hosted in VLEs are generic in nature. Can this type of material, isolated from the context of the student’s learning, really be effective? Are we fooling ourselves and shortchanging the student?

The Big Blue project (www.leeds.ac.uk/bigblue/) has pulled together some examples of best practice in information skills teaching in VLEs along with a review of the literature. It emphasises two key points:

• the need for information skills training to be integrated into the curriculum, rather than to be treated as a separate subject removed from the subject context;
• the need to establish collaborative working partnerships with all those involved in the learning and teaching process.

At Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) these principles have underpinned the development of our in-house information skills package, InfoQuest. This was created over a two-year period and is now starting to make a real impact on how we support information skills development in our increasingly diverse student population. Like other information literacy packages, we address the key strands of information literacy as outlined by various bodies, including Sconul and the American Library Association. Where InfoQuest is distinctive is in the approach we have taken to ensure that the learning becomes embedded into the curriculum, reflects the student’s own learning needs and breaks down some of the traditional barriers to information skills teaching.

We’ve all been there...

We’ve all been there, waiting for a class of students to turn up for an information skills workshop. Half an hour later they saunter in, totally unprepared for your carefully planned session. You now have to condense your material and deliver it at breakneck speed to a largely disinterested group. The chances are that at the end of that session you will have to start the whole process again with the following group and so it goes on, right through the first semester.

Although we had delivered many good, integrated face-to-face workshops, we were becoming increasingly frustrated by trying to deliver a useful volume of material in a ridiculously small time frame, largely removed from the context of the student’s course. There had to be a better way of ensuring that students received the information skills tuition so vital to them, and making sure they understood the relevance of that tuition, absorbed it and used it.

Some new challenges were also presenting themselves, as higher education began to respond to the changing political agenda. Students were coming to us with a greater polarity of skills, making it difficult to pitch sessions at the right level. As a modern, vocational university, many of our students were involved in long periods of professional placement, or were studying at a distance, thus creating limited opportunity for face-to-face teaching. Increasing student numbers led to huge cohorts in some subject areas, necessitating multiple back-to-back workshops which were time-consuming and draining for learning centre staff. Then there is the perennial problem of ensuring that information skills teaching is delivered to students at the point in their studies that will be of most use to them.

Five modules

InfoQuest is an interactive, self-paced first-year skills tutorial, currently hosted in the Blackboard VLE. We have been working with Blackboard for the past two years and usage has increased dramatically in the last academic year, with more than 13,000 users. It is clear that it will become increasingly important in helping the university to support its learning and teaching agenda.

InfoQuest takes students on a structured route through information skills development, with the aim of teaching transferable skills, but the emphasis is firmly based on the SHU learning resource environment. The five modules show them how to search the learning centre catalogue, formulate a search strategy, search relevant information databases and the internet effectively, and put the final piece of work together (references and bibliographies, plagiarism, etc). Modules take students into live SHU-supported databases with exercises within the package that can be tied in closely to first-year work. Not only are they developing skills, but they are using those skills in an immediate way to collect information for their project or assignment.

The design philosophy of InfoQuest, of dividing the content into modules, or chunks, is identical to that inherent in the Blackboard system. So, the package sits very comfortably in Blackboard and content can easily be updated or added. Modules provide live links to the learning centre catalogue and information databases, with exercises running alongside, immediately increasing the relevance for the user. It is also possible for other Blackboard courses to tap into InfoQuest modules, increasing the flexibility of the package yet further.

More time for those who need it most

In reducing some of the contact time and the burden of repetitive group delivery, we have freed up learning centre staff time to target face-to-face support for those students who need it most. In addition, the development of InfoQuest has gone some way to helping courses meet at least some of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority skills requirements. The QCA specifications state that, among other things, information skills should be integrated into the course and should pay due attention to diversity, inclusivity and flexibility. InfoQuest certainly enables those things and, in a modern institution where key skills are high on the agenda, this has been a useful marketing point for the package.

From the outset our vision was to create a resource that could stand in the place of face-to-face skills sessions when necessary. For us, this ruled out the option of the generic route. None of the development team would have considered standing up in front of a class of radiographers without addressing their specific needs for health information. Had we concentrated solely on generic skills in a face-to-face session, we would have cheated the students. The academics involved in the development work were of the same opinion: providing generic material would probably push more of a burden on to them to introduce specifics to students. Using a customised, subject-specific programme would provide more direct support for students in a variety of learning situations.

Now the fun and games really start

So, the InfoQuest framework is designed to be easily customised to meet the needs of any given subject grouping. From the main generic version, tailored subject-specific versions of InfoQuest are created by learning centre subject teams in partnership with academics. Once you have bitten the bullet of subject-specific versions of your skills module the fun and games really start. Who controls the ‘original ‘ version? What level of control do you need to exert over subject versions? How do you know who is doing what? How do you deal with updates and changes that will affect all versions? How do you ensure the quality of the work? We would like to say that we had addressed all of this at the planning stage but, in truth, we had anticipated some problems, but made up solutions to others as we went along. One of the benefits of starting small, testing, evaluating and then branching out is that you can make most of your mistakes on a smaller stage.

The development process

InfoQuest was developed jointly by learning centre information specialists, multimedia developers and school-based academics. Information specialists and academics provided the content and the means for integration into an existing course, and the multimedia staff provided the design input. A prototype version was developed first with social science lecturers who were keen to improve the information literacy skills of their students. It was delivered in September 2000 to 240 first-year social science students.

They liked it!

This trial version was extensively evaluated during 2000/01. Students liked the fact that the delivery was computer-based and that they could use it when and where they wanted, and return to it if necessary. A number of mature students with low-level IT skills found it a ‘safe environment’ to learn in. Academics reported that pass rates in assignments for the unit were up on previous years. The students had consulted a more diverse range of sources, referenced them correctly, and the general quality of academic argument had improved. However, the feedback wasn’t exclusively positive. Some students had found the package a bit dull, for example, but this gave us something to work with. The process since the initial evaluation has been one of continuous evaluation and development, as we respond to feedback from users and academics and the challenges arising from changes to the university infrastructure.

Academics come knocking on our door

From our earlier trials we knew that we had a product that could really help students to get to grips with information skills within a subject context. The positive feedback from these first trials was the key to getting a platform with academics. Timing was good for us as Sheffield Hallam was having a drive to get key skills firmly established within the curriculum. It was a condition of validation for new courses that key skills were clearly identified in terms of learning outcomes and teaching approach. Academics trying to get to grips with this new requirement were strangely receptive to information specialists knocking on their door and offering to create a tailor-made package to address their students’ information literacy skills!

Introduction to students

In the 2001/02 academic year our biggest test for InfoQuest was to deliver it within a Level 1 Health Studies course with a cohort of 290 students from diverse backgrounds. We worked with a small group of academics to create a customised version of InfoQuest that covered the generic skills in a health context and also touched on some of the issues around evidence-based practice. All staff involved in teaching on this course were enrolled on InfoQuest and introduced to it, even if they were not directly involved in teaching on the unit in which InfoQuest was to be based. Many academic staff found it a valuable learning experience in itself, something we need to address in the future as part of the staff development programme.

A team-teaching approach helped to make InfoQuest central to the course. Learning Centre staff contributed to the introductory course lecture and delivered brief introductory workshops. We spent only about 20 minutes with each group of students in the workshops, compared to the two-hour face-to-face sessions used with the previous cohort. We backed these workshops up with an email advice line and drop-in sessions nearer to assignment deadlines. Neither of these safety nets was used much, as students seemed to take to the material easily.

For the unit in which InfoQuest was based, the assessment required students to produce a critique of a research article and then to find a comparative article within their specific health discipline. In doing so, students were asked to demonstrate the skills that they had acquired through InfoQuest and to submit a search strategy profile with their work, explaining how they located and evaluated the information presented.

Why didn’t we have this earlier?

Fully embedding InfoQuest into the curriculum seems to have paid off. Statistics drawn from Blackboard show that students were actively using InfoQuest during their course. The average number of hits per student was around 60. During the introductory workshops we also surveyed students’ existing levels of skills and experience with using information resources. At the completion of their unit a further survey compared their levels of confidence post-InfoQuest. The results clearly indicated that improvements had been made in all areas, with the most dramatic rise being in the areas of electronic journals and database competencies.

We also asked whether students liked InfoQuest. The vast majority did, particularly praising the ease of use and logical approach that InfoQuest presented and the fact that they could return to it when the need arose. From the feedback there were two areas that we needed to address. First, students felt quite strongly that they should have been introduced to InfoQuest earlier in their course, which again confirms the value that students placed on the package. Second, some students were not expecting to have to use the self-directed study time allocated to their unit to develop their own skills and commented on the time this took. We need to make this requirement more explicit at the outset of the course of study.

Future plans

Some institutions may not have the expertise of multimedia designers or the staff to support developing subject-specific packages. But this method brings noticeable benefits to students. Demand from academics is increasing and several now want to work with us to create higher-level versions of InfoQuest.

InfoQuest currently has a presence in eight of the university’s 11 schools, and we are aiming to include all of them by the end of the 2002/03 academic year. Other plans include finding ways of integrating assessment of skills into the package and of addressing some of the interoperability issues that are potential barriers to us sharing this resource with colleagues in our associated colleges. We have an easily customised framework which we are keen to make available to as many users as possible. Reflection, testing and evaluation should ensure that the package constantly evolves and continues to meet changing user needs.

Kay Moore and Claire Abson are Information Specialists in the Learning Centre at Sheffield Hallam University (K.M.Moore@shu.ac.uk; C.Abson@shu.ac.uk).