Homegrown tutorial series has worldwide impact

BY WENDY ELLIOTT

welliott@kentvilleadvertiser.ca

NovaNewsNow.com

The Canadian Association of University Business Officers awarded an honourable mention to staff at Acadia University recently. The award was for a project called Information Literacy Online: Interactive Tutorials for Research Skills.

Librarian Tanja Harrision, who as coordinator went to Winnipeg to pick up the award, says, “we were selected as an honourable award winner from 46 applications submitted by other universities in Canada.

Harrison said, “I was told that the honourable award winners are projects that CAUBO wanted to highlight on a national level.”

The tutorial project is being used worldwide by librarians and other educators to help teach students. Information literacy is the emphasis, she said. It’s the ability to access, evaluate, contextualize and communicate information.

Harrison believes that information literacy is a skill integral to the goals of a university education. With this form of literacy, a person has developed skills in critical analysis and research that enable lifelong learning, societal leadership and professional competence.

Librarians at Acadia created the series of web-based, interactive tutorials to assist students in acquiring and improving research skills, said the coordinator. The tutorials were conceived not only for the benefit of students, but also to provide professors and librarians with resources they could incorporate into their own teaching.

You Quote It, You Note It

The first tutorial, “You Quote It, You Note It,” was created in 2004 and inspired by a growing concern about academic integrity on campus. Later modules included “Credible Sources Count,” which introduces students to evaluating web information; “Searching With Success” (2005), which reviews best approaches to searching the web; and “Research It Right” (2006), which outlines the basics of the research process.

The final module in the series, “Source for Courses”, is scheduled for release in July, Harrison says. The objective of this tutorial will be to emphasize the importance of using academic sources as opposed to many found on the free web.

All of the modules are freely accessible from the Acadia library website and each has received enthusiastic reception from librarians, professors and teachers worldwide, she added.

In 2004, the first tutorial won the Acadia President's Award for Innovation. All of them have been submitted and accepted into a peer-reviewed database. Evaluation and formal research have confirmed benefits to student learning, Harrison said.

“The project is a success story that continues to develop and grow” and her recent research has only proved the effectiveness of the tutorials.

The four published tutorials are available for viewing at

library.acadiau.ca