A Sustainable Approach to Teaching Information Literacy: Reaching the Masses Online

The University of Auckland's business faculty has an annual undergraduate intake of close to 2,000 students. This presents challenges when teaching an information literacy skills program, in particular how to provide an equitable lesson, accessible to all, that is able to be taught in a sustainable way. To address these issues the business librarians, in collaboration with the University's Centre for Academic Development, produced an online tutorial about business information. The tutorial was modular, with each module addressing an aspect of understanding, searching, evaluating, and citing business information. In 2010 the tutorial was included in a core Bachelor of Commerce course as an assessed piece of work. After the assessment period a formal evaluation of the tutorial was completed with 125 students answering questions about the usefulness of the skills learnt, clarity of instructions, and difficulty of content. The findings were positive with almost two thirds of students indicating they would continue to refer to the tutorial in their future studies.