Pam McKinney here, live-blogging from the third day of the ECIL conference. In the first session after lunch, Helene N. Andreassen, Inga Bårdsen Tøllefsen, Torstein Låg from the UiT The Arctic University of Norway spoke about their work to develop information literacy and academic writing teaching. They have iKomp, which is an online asynchronous introduction to information literacy, library staff in synchronous teaching sessions and academic writing support, mostly taught by the program staff themselves. In 2023, they needed to change the support due to some institutional revisions that made it compulsory for all bachelor's programmes to include a mandatory digital stand-alone asynchronous information literacy course. This posed some problems, because the librarians were convinced that practice is essential to develop IL and academic writing skills, the practice should be discipline-specific and take place over time, and there needs to be problem-solving exercises for students to engage with.
There are some tensions: i.e. between the discipline-specific nature of IL and the need for interdisciplinary teaching that saves time and money. There is increasing demand from academic departments for high-quality teaching, but there are few staff in the library who are all busy. It wasn't obvious how the librarians could offer this mandatory training suggested by the university management. Eventually, it was decided that this mandatory training should consist of 2 parts: two digital asynchronous interdisciplinary self-study components, and secondly, learning and assessment activities that are more longitudinal, synchronous and delivered through academic departments.
The academic writing (aks) self-study online component now covers a range of topics, and is intended to be used as an "encyclopedia" of techniques that students can go back to. It is simple and visually appealing. The information literacy resource focuses on the core of information literacy, with more examples, videos and activities. They have created an online resource bank for teachers to develop their synchronous teaching, with examples of classroom activities and assessments.
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