Supplementing The Learning Portal

Library staff in Ontario Colleges joined forces (superheroes do that sometimes ~ think Justice League) to create an open portal for students to solidify their research, writing, and study skills, digital citizenship, and career exploration. If you haven’t checked out The Learning Portal and shared it with your students, do not hesitate ~ https://tlp-lpa.ca/ca!

My experience in college libraries and Centres for Teaching and Learning taught me that faculty are often unsure of how to assess for these important skills embedded in the Ministry’s program standards, across disciplines, mainly as Essential Employability Skills.

The information in this short digest offers ready-to-go, step-by-step activities to complete relevant assessments that build students’ awareness of these key concepts and challenges them to build on their developing skills in the areas of research, writing, and digital citizenship. Faculty are encouraged to adopt the activities as is; adapt them to their own learning environments; and | or extend them to capture more skill development.

Behind the Curtain

The specific activities in this open text were designed with the following intentions:

• Offer a 1-2 hour online activity for students to solidify core skills to all disciplines and workplaces. This aligns with a current trend to move at least one hour of learning online at many of Ontario Colleges.
• Pique students’ interest and curiosity. While many of the activities complement specific disciplines, they are also of general interest and work as standalone activities for a course.
• Highlight a variety of open or free educational technologies by using them to underpin the activities. These may be of interest to both students and faculty for future teaching, learning, and working environments. Ease of use was another criterion in choosing these, specific technologies.
• Activities have natural extensions:
  • create components to form a larger assessment that moves beyond the original 1-2 hour time commitment;
  • add pre- and | or post- activity pieces for face-to-face learning;
  • switch easily from ‘lightly’ collaborative activities to become more highly collaborative depending on the discipline.

Front Facing Format

Part One

This open text is divided into three components. The first part details the ACRL’s (Association for College & Research Libraries) recently updated Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. From its Introduction:

This Framework grows out of a belief that information literacy as an educational reform movement will realize its potential only through a richer, more complex set of core ideas. During the fifteen years since the publication of the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, academic librarians and their partners in higher education associations have developed learning outcomes, tools, and resources that some institutions have deployed to infuse information literacy concepts and skills into their curricula. However, the rapidly changing higher education environment, along with the dynamic and often uncertain information ecosystem in which all of us work and live, require new attention to be focused on foundational ideas about that ecosystem.

Students have a greater role and responsibility in creating new knowledge, in understanding the contours and the changing dynamics of the world of information, and in using information, data, and scholarship ethically. Faculty have a greater responsibility in designing curricula and assignments that foster enhanced engagement with the core ideas about information and scholarship within their disciplines. Librarians have a greater responsibility in identifying core ideas within their own knowledge domain that can extend learning for students, in creating a new cohesive curriculum for information literacy, and in collaborating more extensively with faculty.

http://www.ala.org/acrl

While faculty may not be familiar with ACRL and its goals, the first few pages of this text spark reflection on the changing environment for today’s citizens and the ever-increasing complexity of information literacy or fluency. Through this reflection, skills that once were assumed to develop almost naturally over the course of a student’s education, can now be addressed more intentionally with their impact on success more clearly seen. Subtle and yet key distinctions between knowledge and dispositions assist with viewing progress from both the cognitive and affective domains.

Part Two

Here, you will find the activities themselves. While they target different skills, with naturally overlap, they each follow the same format.

1. The ABCs: Academic Bases Covered: Alignment to program | discipline needs; goals; and specific skills development | learning outcomes.
2. A diagnostic activity to provide an understanding of what concepts, terms, and | or skills are covered.
3. Any background information required to complete the activities. This includes direct reference to The Learning Portal as well as other, open, foundational knowledge core to the subject of the activity.
4. Step-by-steps to complete the activity follow. Here is where faculty (or keen students) can increase easily the complexity of, and commitment to, the activity.

Part Three

To aid assessment, recommended rubrics comprise part three. Specific rubrics are not included to allow for faculty agency. Instead VALUE rubrics are re-built to be shared and adapted to suit the course’s and students’ needs.

They are excerpted from VALUE Rubrics, developed by the AAC&U (Association of American Colleges and Universities) after a two year, collaborative projects among 100 higher education institutions across the United States. They have been adopted and adapted worldwide.

Beyond the background information on the rubric and the highlighting of aligned criteria for the activities, the rubrics can be mixed, matched, and weighted to suit the needs of course’s learning outcomes and your students.