Online Learning Communities: Enhancing Undergraduate Students' Acquisition of Information Skills

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of online learning communities (OLC) on enhancing the undergraduate students' acquisition of information skills. OLC was compared with online tutorials and one-shot face-to-face sessions designed to facilitate students' information skill acquisition. Data were gathered through multiple sources: a pre-test and a post-test, focus groups, course discussion postings, and course emails. The ANOVA on the post-test revealed that there was significant statistical difference among different formats. The ad-hoc Tukey test revealed that the OLC was the most effective delivery format in terms of student's acquisition of information skills. © 2011 Elsevier Inc..