Information literacy and web-scale discovery: A flexible learning approach

Online tutorials are now widely used by academic libraries to deliver information literacy instruction. With two thirds of their student population studying by distance education, the Information Librarians at Charles Sturt University have promoted e-learning over class room tuition for the past four years. The implementation of a web-scale discovery tool in 2011 produced new challenges for delivering online information literacy skills. Library literature advises allowing more flexibility in teaching, placing greater emphasis on skills such as identifying information sources and evaluating results, while continuing to include individual database searching. Unpredictable search results that can quickly be explained in a classroom are harder to address in online material. With feedback from students suggesting that current library tutorials were too long and over reliant on text, the challenge for the Information Librarians was to deliver more, yet imprecise, information while continuing to engage the students.