The Secrets (and Big Business) of Search Engines: Teaching Information Literacy for the Digital Age in the Semester Long Freshman Seminar.

The Byrne Seminars are an elective series of pass/fail one-credit freshmen seminars at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, designed to introduce students to the research process at the beginning of their studies. All classes are proposed and taught by full time tenured and tenure-track faculty in an area of their research interest, in small classes capped at 20 students. In AY 2014-2015, 5 members of the Rutgers University Library faculty offered seminars in their own areas of research interest. This presentation discusses the experiences of teaching one such course with a thematic focus on critical thinking for the web. The course, The Secrets (and Big Business) of Search Engines, was offered in two consecutive semesters as a way of introducing information literacy in a non-library context that is easily extended outside the classroom. Goals included increasing the impact of library faculty instruction, exploring alternatives to the one-shot bibliographic instruction session, and developing information literacy competencies as early in the undergraduate experience as possible in a way that could be utilized throughout their studies and beyond the university. Structuring content, developing assignments and the assessment methods used throughout the class will be discussed, as well as the assessment model planned for the AY 2015-2016 sections