E-Learning: IL Instruction & Out-of-the-Box Software

Institutes of higher education are increasingly incorporating Information Literacy (IL) into their educational goals. Academic departments are actively seeking ways to incorporate IL into their curriculum in addition to seeking methods to assess the instruction provided. As IL providers, librarians are in a unique position to collaborate with teaching faculty to address the educational needs of their students. This session will discuss the Information Literacy Education (ILE) project at Washington State University, Pullman. Mapped to the six learning goals of the baccalaureate, university strategic plan, and a 2000 Washington State legislature mandate, the ILE project provides an opportunity to collaborate with course instructors in assignment design to incorporate IL instruction through an online learning environment. Designed to work with an existing research assignment the ILE project adds an additional component that directly addresses the elements of IL inherent in the assignment (popular vs. scholarly, source evaluation, plagiarism, etc.) by providing instruction, and multiple layers of assessment that focus on the learning of the material and the transfer of knowledge to contextualized applications and feedback. Elements of the discussion will include instructional design, usability, scalability, applied learning theory, instructor librarian collaboration, and assignment design