Achieving Information Literacy

Proposal to the University for an Information Literacy Program (July 2000)

1. Program Objectives

University Objective: To ensure that the University community is knowledgeable about information resources and has the skills required to build, innovate, and discover within the information environment in support of their research, teaching, learning and managing roles.

Program Objective and Strategy:

• Develop a systematic approach to providing staff and students with opportunities to develop their skills to match developments in the information environment.
• Enable the University community to realise the potential of the available information resources in meeting their professional goals.
• Create a broad set of opportunities over the next three years for staff and students to develop their information literacy skills and to devise policies and practices which assure the University that such opportunities will be ongoing.

This will be realised by placing current provisions for training in information skills into a coordinated framework and adding courses which allow staff and students to reach competency levels for basic IT and information skills. The program will explore opportunities for providing accreditation to those who require it.

The program will include strategies for ensuring opportunities to develop higher-level information skills appropriate to individual vocational and scholastic pathways. A mix of formal training courses, syllabus development and a range of help systems will be the major delivery modes.

Staff and students must have the skills to access, practice in and understand, the current information environment. The fully devolved management approach to information literacy adopted over the past 5 years has not achieved the desired result, so a centrally-driven, high impact program is being proposed. The delivery will, however, be localised wherever possible.

Feedback : Please direct all comments to ILP Project Manager