Web-based user education

User education is an important aspect of university libraries' service to its users. This Masters' Thesis is about online user education. The aim of this study is to analyse five Swedish online user courses in relation to information literacy and learning theory. The web-sites were explored through textual analyses to find how concepts of information literacy and learning theory are expressed. The theoretical framework is based on Carol C Kuhlthau's three levels of user education, Paul Ramsden's three theories of teaching in higher education and Christine Bruce's different aspects of information literacy. The study reveals that the source approach to user education as described by Kuhlthau is the most common i.e. the library and its resources are the focus. I also found, using Bruce's different aspects of information literacy, that different aspects existed, but the information source approach and the information process approach dominated. This result differs a little from Bruce's own discussion where she meant that information literacy curriculum in higher education clusters around information technology and information source conceptions. Using Ramsden' s theories of teaching I found that the most common teaching strategy in the user courses was teaching as transmission of information.Uppsatsnivå: