University of Akron librarians created a menu of online information literacy modules that highlight the research skills needed to be successful as students start college. These online lessons may be required by individual course instructors. Students should check their syllabi at the start of the semester to determine which lessons are required in each course.
See the lesson descriptions, estimated times for completion, and student learning outcomes below the instructions.
If you have any questions regarding this course contact lib-online-tutorials@lists.uakron.edu. (Please put Library 201: Lesson X in the subject line.)
Chat and text us during normal Library hours of operation.
You will need to enroll in the Library 201 course in Brightspace to get started.
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You will be required to attain a 70% in order to get credit for each lesson. It is open "book," open notes, so to speak. You can have the lesson open in another window while you take it if you like. However, it isn't "open friend." You are expected to do your own work and can't get the answers from other people.
You can take each lesson's quiz multiple times and the quizzes are not timed. If you take the quiz twice and don't get a 70% or higher, please email us at lib-online-tutorials@lists.uakron.edu. Please put "Library 201: Lesson X" in the subject line, indicating the lesson you're working on.
We are requiring students to complete a one-time demographic survey in order to qualify for lesson certificates. Your answers to the survey will aid us in statistical data collection. We report the answers to the questions only: we won't report names with this information. You must complete this survey to get a certificate of completion. Please only complete the survey once.
To receive a certificate for the lessons:
When you receive a certificate, open up the link, and select "Generate Certificate."
Open with: Adobe Acrobat DC
Save to your computer and submit to any instructors who required the Library 201 modules.
At any time you can view your available certificates by selecting the "Awards" link from the navigation bar.
One of the foundations of information literacy is the understanding of how information is created and processed. Distinguishing between the varieties of information is crucial to understanding how to locate and evaluate the information you need. This lesson is essential for knowing why your instructors require different types of information as part of your assignments and being able to quickly determine if the information you're considering will meet the assignment's requirements.
After successfully completing this module, you will be able to:
Many courses on information literacy wait to cover evaluating information until the end, after you have completed searches, compiled a number of resources, and want to evaluate the information for your individual information needs. Even though you will need to evaluate your research once you begin the work of preparing your end product, whether it's a speech, presentation, annotated bibliography, research paper, etc., it's important to evaluate throughout the research process, especially at the beginning.
Keeping the key evaluation criteria at the forefront of your thoughts will help you select appropriate resources to begin with. Knowing the factors to look for when critically looking at your search results will help you save time in the long run. These segments will outline the evaluation criteria to consider from the start of your investigations.
After successfully completing this module, you will be able to:
The purpose of this module is to help the student identify the steps involved in creating a research plan, create well-formed questions from their own brainstormed topics that have to do with your research, understand how to choose their keywords from their research questions (while accounting for the variations that will be found), and help to choose an appropriate database for their topic so that they achieve accurate and helpful results.
After successfully completing this module, you will be able to:
This module teaches the student different types of search strategies involving phrases, truncation, and boolean operators as well as how to construct them. It also helps the student understand how to tell which items are indexed where and what field they are in within the UA Library Catalog so that they can use it appropriately. Also, the student is taught how to use those search strategies to find relevant information to their topic, how to get different materials from the UA Library, and how to identify different catalog searches while knowing when to use each type.
After successfully completing this module, you will be able to:
In this module, the student will learn how to share search results in order to easily work with others, figure out common fields within a database so that it can be looked through in an efficient manner, search using a basic or advanced search in order to find relevant information, understand how to get different materials from databases, understand how to analyze search results and determine what could cause more or fewer results, and figure out how to view the full-text of a document.
After successfully completing this module, you will be able to:
The purpose of this module is to help students to be able to define a URL as well as the internet while also being able to troubleshoot problems, to help them tell the difference between search engines and research databases based on certain criteria so that they know which to use, and how to construct a search in Google and Google Scholar using their advanced search or basic search to find relevant materials.
After successfully completing this module, you will be able to: