Abstract - Developing an online information skills tutorial for NHS users

Abstract - Developing an online information skills tutorial for NHS users

Background Information.

The Library and Information Resource Centre at University Hospital Aintree is managed by Edge Hill College of Higher Education, and has contracts to supply library and information services to four NHS Trusts: Aintree Hospitals Trust, Walton Centre for Neurology and Neurosurgery, South Sefton Primary Care Trust. Staff at the Library and Information Resource Centre (LIRC) have developed dedicated Web pages for its NHS users, and through these pages they can access many clinical information resources, including nationally, regionally and locally procured electronic journals, databases and electronic books. In order for LIRC users to fully understand and manipulate such resources now requires a high level of information literacy. Therefore developing information literacy skills in users has been identified as a priority by the LIRC team.

Project

The LIRC team have developed a health information skills tutorial, which takes users through all aspects and stages of information literacy and use of specific health information resources. The LIRC team have encountered many obstacles when using traditional face to face teaching and learning methods, including space, physical resources and in particular time commitments from those users undertaking information skills training. The new tutorial has been developed so that it may be delivered online through the use of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), in this instance through WebCT. This mode of delivery means that extremely busy clinicians and users of the LIRC are able to learn online in their own time, and most importantly, at their own pace.

The Tutorial

This online tutorial contains six units, and first unit provides the context to the learning of information literacy and includes an online self-audit. This self-audit aims to link questions to sections of the tutorial, thus identifying participants' skills gaps and the sections of the tutorial where these gaps can be addressed.

The six units of the tutorial deliver teaching and learning via a balance of:

- Textual information

- Interactive learning opportunities (i.e. the use of animated representations of abstract concepts for participants to follow)

- Guided searches of live electronic information resources (where the users is invited to view an electronic information resource being used in a particular context)

- Summative interactive quizzes at the end of each unit.

- Activities for users of the tutorial to undertake.

The paper will demonstrate the pedagogical and technological developments of the online information skills tutorial, and will include evaluative data from a pilot of NHS learners who have been studying information skills using the online tutorial. The paper will also illustrate the online teaching and learning processes that underpin the tutorial and will draw upon the reflections of both the users and of the LIRC staff. Finally the paper will also attempt to demonstrate the effects that interactive online learning has on NHS staff competencies in using information resources.