Lifelong learning in an engineering communication course

Abstract

Assessment using the simple Search Strategy Page involves assessing the students' topic, their individual focus in their section of the final report as well as how and what they have found from searching the Googles, Primo and the databases. It is often the first time the students have heard of or used these sources. The Search Strategy Page, however, is perhaps best suited to a smaller academic library with only one librarian. Our Page is basic and introduces a means of evaluating the initial searching capabilities of our students; it is a place to guide the students' searching, as well as evaluate the teaching content by the librarian. Often a pattern manifests itself in the comments on these Search Strategy Pages where the librarian sees areas that need more in-depth exploring and/or examples for future classes. There have been critical challenges in teaching information literacy in the past few years with the advent of both big data [28] and fake news and fake video detection in this post-truth era. Indeed, the title of Leetaru's [29] paper emphasizes that fake news is an information literacy problem, not a technology one. As well, there are new uses of information technologies such as the Internet of Things and Tweets that make timely information literacy even more essential. These aspects provide some possible future directions, either as part of the instruction for this course if there is time, or in developing a separate course.