Information Literacy Course for University Teachers: How to Integrate a Model for Scientific Information Seeking into Teaching

Teaching information literacy for students is an established task of university libraries. Many university libraries even offer information literacy courses included in the curricula. Students’ information literacies and their teaching have also been researched widely. However, information literacy courses directed to university teachers are still rare: quite a few have been arranged, even fewer researched. In Finland, the university teachers’ information literacy has been raised as a central part of university pedagogics in the teaching project HELLA – Higher Education Learning Lab. HELLA is a research-based development project on higher education pedagogy that is developing and piloting a new study module (60 ECTS) in higher education in order to strengthen the pedagogic and digital teaching competencies of the teaching staff of the universities and the universities of applied sciences.Digital learning is based on Phenomenon Based Learning (PhenoBL), where wide information literacies are important. In digital learning the libraries’ and librarians’ expertise and know-how in information and digital literacies, in digital resources and digitalization, and in open research and open science are most essential. University libraries use the majority of their acquisition budget for digital information resources. There are also more and more high-quality open access resources. Information literacy is a meta skill that helps the successful progress of studies, is an essential working life skill and supports lifelong learning. In HELLA, the Tritonia Academic
Library is responsible for planning and piloting of the course ‘Digital information resources and information literacy for university teachers’ (5 ETCS) taught as a hybrid course. The course aims to develop university teachers’information literacy and pedagogic competence to use digital information resources in their teaching and research. The teacher’s information and digital literacies are reflected in teaching and form a model for students’ literacies. The target of the course is to integrate scientific information
seeking into teaching so that the teacher with her/his own activities serves as a model for students’ information skills.
The course was planned in the winter 2017-2018 in an intensive workshop project by a team of information specialists and pedagogues using the Carpe Diem Learning Design Model by Gilly Salmon. It is a team-based learning design process to be used as an alternative to traditional staff development processes to create fast, effective, and forward looking learning design. The workshop is spent on designing something that can be put into immediate use with learners: the vision, the learning outcomes,
the action plan, the schedule, the activities, the assessment and the online environment of the course.In this paper special characteristics of the information literacy course for university teachers based on digital learning are analysed:what kind of information needs and learning objectives the course covers and with what kind of teaching methods. A teaching design process
of the course carried out in a multi-professional team is described and evaluated. This working paper constitutes a part of the research-based development of the course.