Planning user education in a library can be quite straightforward. Filling a few hours with a certain amount of content and hoping for the best is probably the easiest way there is. The Karolinska Institutet University Library (KIB) wanted to establish something completely different. By engaging students and working professionals KIB created a distance course tailor-made especially for nursing students!
Nursing students in Sweden today are confronted with much more theoretical components in their studies. How to deal with databases like PubMed and Cinahl, and how to read a scientific article, are ingredients the library is supposed to pass on to the students. When entering the labour market as a nurse, the former students are even supposed to implement business intelligence and customer support in dealing with patients.
As a first step KIB, in co-operation with the Department of Nursing, with the use of the problem-based method WebQuest, created a course incorporating the above-mentioned ingredients. This approach works, but is not sufficient. Hence the creation of the next step: a driving licence for information literacy.
The central part in the driving licence is the problem or question to be solved. With the help of tailor made web pages, a learning management system, class room activities and several tests, KIB staff and students are participating actively in forming the information literate nurse. As a result the driving licence is a compulsory and integral part of the students’ first term, accounting for 40 study hours.
The first results are encouraging. The students are motivated; teachers from the Department of Nursing and KIB established an active working relationship and professionals at hospitals are aware of a course with a working life perspective. |