WVU Libraries

Imagine your students turning in well-researched term papers rather than essays based on Wikipedia or a handful of questionable sources plucked from Google searches. That’s one of the goals of the West Virginia University Libraries’ Information Literacy Course Enhancement Program (ILCEP).

ILCEP, a joint initiative between the Libraries and the Provost’s Office, connects instructors with librarians to enrich student learning by incorporating information literacy concepts into established courses. It addresses the first goal of WVU’s 2020 Strategic Plan: “engaging undergraduates in a challenging academic environment.”

Interested? There are five spots available for the 2014-2015 academic year.

Instructors will each receive a $3,000 summer stipend (12-month faculty receive relevant professional remuneration). Each will work with a librarian to revise the syllabus to include relevant information literacy learning outcomes. The revised courses will be co-taught during the fall 2014 or spring 2015 semester.

A new option this year will be three-way collaboration with a faculty member, an academic librarian, and a member of the staff from the Teaching and Learning Commons of WVU’s Academic Innovations.

Over the past five years, 32 faculty members and more than 2,500 students have participated. Of the 32 courses, six were at the masters and doctoral levels.

Student feedback has been positive:

“At the start of the semester, doing the research made me feel anxious, but the more info lit project[s] we did, the more comfortable and confident I felt.”

“I think that learning how to use RefWorks has been one of the most useful things we have been taught.”

“I now know how to use other search engines and scholarly journals instead of just typing it into Google and hoping for the best.”

“I found this course extremely successful. It really enhanced my research ability and gave me the skills I need to do research in the future. I am very thankful that I now know how to find academic articles. This will help me in graduate school.”

Faculty also reported benefits:

“I found this project to be a perfect companion for the critical and creative thinking modules. Learning to frame questions and to gather information was a new process for most of the students whose prior education experience had been merely to memorize the ‘correct’ answer for the test. This project challenged them to begin to think differently—to ‘step it up’ to the expectations of university level academic achievement.”

“The learning objects generated in this ILCEP initiative are reusable in future course offerings, allowing the instruction-librarian partnership to devote greater attention to student monitoring and one-on-one support.”

At the end of the academic year, the instructor and librarian will participate in a “Showcase of Information Literacy Learning Progress” forum to share results and encourage similar initiatives across the disciplines. Visit http://libguides.wvu.edu/infolit and go to the Faculty Academy box to click on the posters from past participants.

To apply for the program, visit http://wvufaculty.wvu.edu/opportunities and click on “Information Literacy Course Enhancement Stipends.” The deadline is 5 p.m. March 19.

For more information, contact Carroll Wilkinson, Director of Instruction and Information Literacy, at 304-293-0308 or carroll.wilkinson@mail.wvu.edu.