THE DESIGN OF AN INTERACTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

ON INFORMATION LITERACY
Fotini Chalalambous & Iolie Nicolaidou
Department of Communication and Internet Studies, Cyprus University of Technology
(CYPRUS)
[email protected], [email protected]

Abstract
Citizens not appropriately prepared for the needs of the information society age, in which the amount
of information increases exponentially, face the danger of misinformation or trusting non-credible
sources of information. Information literacy, defined as a learner’s ability to identify, evaluate, organize
and effectively use information to solve a problem, is a fundamental skill for the information society
age. Recognizing the importance of this skill, the goal of this project was the systematic design,
development and evaluation of an information literacy program targeting first-year undergraduate
students of a public university in Cyprus.
As part of a learner analysis, an online survey on information literacy was completed by a sample of
190 students. Results indicated that students use a variety of sources for locating material, mostly
from the Internet (75.6%), or books from the library (70.9%). Journal articles are used by only 33.9%
of students. Most students prefer Google (70%), rather than databases (45%) or electronic journals
(41%) for locating articles. The results of the survey also indicated that students are not autonomous
in their search for information as they prefer to ask for support from librarians (45.9%) rather than
retrieve sources of information themselves. Moreover, more than half of the students consider their
training in locating appropriate material as “necessary” (58%).
After identifying the need for the development of students’ information literacy skills, a proposed
solution was the systematic design of an interactive learning environment based on international
standards. The goal of the learning environment was to demonstrate how information can be
identified, evaluated, processed and used so that students can become autonomous and responsible
consumers of information. The learning environment included a) text and images, to provide and
illustrate information, b) videos, for motivation purposes, c) interactive practice-exercises for the
evaluation of given sources, which included instant feedback, and d) a self-evaluation instrument. As
a pilot-study, only the “evaluation of information” module of information literacy was developed fully.
This module was pilot-tested with a total of 38 students, in two groups of 20 and 18 students,
respectively. Students worked collaboratively for approximately two hours focusing on the evaluation
criteria for websites, books and journals. At the end of the session they completed an online
evaluation, which indicated that 94.7% of students were generally satisfied with the “evaluation of
information” module. They also thought that it was “informative” and “original” to a great extent as well
as “helpful” and “user-friendly”. Two-thirds of the students indicated that they would like to use the
completed version of the learning environment when it is available.
Preliminary results indicated that a student-centered, multimedia learning environment on information
literacy seems to be a fruitful approach for the development of undergraduate students’ information
literacy skills. The environment, which was developed based on instructional design principles,
allowed users to study the material at their own pace, practice evaluation skills, receive instant
feedback, self-evaluate, and interact with other users. Future research directions refer to the
development of all the modules of the learning environment and the evaluation of its educational value
for students.

Keywords: information literacy, interactive learning environment, undergraduate students, instructional

design
1 THE IMPORTANCE OF INFORMATION LITERACY SKILLS
Citizens not appropriately prepared for the needs of the information age, in which the amount of
information increases exponentially, face the danger of misinformation or trusting non-credible sources
of information. Information literacy, defined as a learner’s ability to identify, evaluate, organize and
effectively use information to solve a problem, is a fundamental skill for the information society age.
Many definitions have been proposed over the years for information literacy, one of which was given
by the American Association of Libraries in 1989: information literate is the person who knows how to
learn, because he/she knows how information is organized, how to identify information and how to use
it in a way so that others can learn from him/her as well [1]. Over time, several skills have been added
to this definition, some of which are, for example, the skills of evaluating information, critical thinking
and problem solving. Moreover, information literate persons are expected to function in an
autonomous way, and to be flexible and effective [2]. The goal of information literacy programs is
therefore to support students to become autonomous learners so that they are better equipped with
the skills necessary for them to survive in the information society age.
Previous research documented undergraduate students’ difficulties with respect to information literacy
skills. Lindsay, Cummings, Johnson and Scales (2006) showed that students prefer to search for
information using the Google search engine, they prefer to use commercial websites to locate sources
in which their university library subscribes to and they cannot distinguish between the functions of the
electronic catalogue of the library (OPAC) and the ones of databases [3]. At the local level, previous
research in which participants were students of a local public university in Cyprus, the Cyprus
University of Technology, showed that undergraduate students face difficulties with respect to locating
information, correctly using keywords, using appropriate databases and correctly evaluating the
credibility of retrieved results [4].
Several models for teaching information literacy skills have been proposed at an international level.
According to these models for an educational program on information literacy to be successful, it has
to be designed based on specific learning goals, the institution’s infrastructure and the human
resources that are available [5]. These models define the process that a user follows to reach his/her
goal and their basic axes are the following:
a) identification of the problem (analysis),
b) searching for information (search strategies)
c) identifying information (evaluation)
d) organizing information
e) using information (synthesis)
f) ethical use of information

The need to support students in developing information literacy skills was recognized by librarians of
academic libraries, who during the last decade began to realize that their role is also changing as they
need to face different challenges. A librarian has traditionally had a guiding role for students focusing
on helping users identify the information they needed from the library’s available sources. However,
new models of information literacy reinforce the educational role of librarians [6] and tend to suggest
the librarians’ involvement in the teaching and learning process.
The landscape of higher education is changing [7] and professors adopt innovative ways of teaching
and communicating with their students, while at the same time academic institutions worldwide
attempt to attract more students, reinforcing the idea of life long learning and distance learning. What
is more, in addition to the technological advancements, library users face a complicated system of
searching for and using information. The vast increase of information that is nowadays accessible at
our fingertips has led to users susceptible to the danger of misinformation [8], as students, mostly of
undergraduate level, often times cannot identify the information they are searching for, nor can they
identify the correct source for locating information. Another challenge faced by academic libraries
refers to their current users: the new generation of students, who can be characterized as digital
natives [9, 10], or are otherwise known as net generation, milenials, or generation Y [11]. There is
evidence to suggest that 21st century students have some characteristics that the previous
generations of students were lacking. For example, 21st century students feel the need of belonging to
social groups, as opposed to previous generations of students who were more independent, they learn
through play, they can easily manage new technologies and they have a strong preference to
interactivity [11]. Evidence suggests that these new generation students have strong multitasking
abilities [9], while at the same time they are weak in writing [12].
Recent trends emphasize the design of more interesting and interactive learning environments [13],
especially for librarians, who need to adopt state-of-the-art and innovative ways for information literacy
education. Recognizing the importance of information literacy skills, the goal of this project was the
systematic design, development and evaluation of an information literacy program targeting first-year
undergraduate students of a public university in Cyprus.

2 LEARNER ANALYSIS
The first step that needs to be followed before an educational intervention is designed, according to an
instructional design model [14] is learner analysis. As part of a learner analysis, an online survey on
information literacy was completed by a sample of 190 students (54 male and 136 female students) at
the Cyprus University of Technology. The survey ran for two weeks (from Oct.18th 2012 until
November 2nd 2012).
As expected, the vast majority of students (95.8%) indicated that they are familiar with using
computers, confirming the hypothesis of the study that they are “digital natives” and 91,7% of students
consider the use of the library as necessary for them to complete class assignments and reports.
Results indicated that students use a variety of sources for locating material in general, e.g. for their
class assignments, that come mostly from the Internet (75.6%), or books from the library (70.9%).
Research articles are used only by 33.9% of students (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Sources of information used by students to locate material

When students have to perform an online search for information (Figure 2), 88,7% of them use the
google search engine and only a very small percentage of students makes use of the library website
(18,5%), government portals (5,3%) or repositories (0,7%).
Figure 2: Sources of information that students use for online search for information

When they have to locate research articles in particular, most students prefer to use Google (70%),
rather than databases (45%) or electronic journals (41%) as their sources (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Sources of information used by students to identify research articles

The results of the survey also indicated that students are not autonomous in their search for
information as they prefer to ask for support from librarians (45.9%) rather than retrieve sources of
information themselves. Moreover, more than half of the students consider their training in locating
appropriate material as “necessary” (58%) (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Percentage of students who consider training in information literacy skills as necessary
Some identified limitations of the survey refer to the small sample of students who participated. The
total number of undergraduate students at the Cyprus University of Technology is approximately 1700,
therefore the percentage of students in the sample only represents 11.2% of the student population.
Moreover, the sample included undergraduate students from all four years of studies, therefore it was
not targeting first year students, a sample of the population that has increased need for support for
developing information literacy skills. Finally, time restrictions only allowed the survey to run for two
weeks.

3 DESIGN OF AN INTERACTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT ON

INFORMATION LITERACY
After identifying the need for the development of students’ information literacy skills, a proposed
solution was the systematic design of an interactive learning environment based on international
standards, such as the ones set by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions
[15], by the Association of College and Research Libraries-ACRL [16] and by the Australian and New
Zealand Institute for Information Literacy-ANZIIL [17]. No such tool is available at the Cyprus
University of Technology, where frequently, librarians conduct training seminars either to individuals or
to groups of students to help them become familiar with services offered at the library and better
understand the tools available for their research work. The development of an interactive learning
environment on information literacy is expected to address this need.
The goal of the learning environment was to demonstrate how information can be identified,
evaluated, processed and used so that students can become autonomous and responsible consumers
of information. The information literacy steps that will be developed at a future stage in the project are
the following: a) identifying an information need, b) searching for information, c) evaluating
information, d) organizing information and e) synthesizing information (Figure 5).
Figure 5: Screenshot of the home page of the learning environment showing all five areas of
information literacy and a short video explaining the concept of information literacy

Figure 6: Screenshot of the learning environment showing the developed module of “evaluating
information” and the subtopics of internet sources, books and articles
As a pilot-study the third step, the evaluation of information, was developed fully as an autonomous
section (Figure 6). The learning environment included a) text and images, to provide and illustrate
information, b) videos, for motivation purposes (Figure 5), c) interactive practice-exercises for the
evaluation of given sources, which included instant feedback (Figure 7), and d) a self-evaluation
instrument.

Figure 7: Screenshot showing an example of an interactive practice-exercise for the evaluation of

given sources. By clicking on submission students could receive instant feedback indicating correct
answers

4 PRELIMINARY EVALUATION RESULTS

As a pilot-study, only the “evaluation of information” module of information literacy was developed
fully. This module was pilot-tested with a total of 38 students, in two groups of 20 and 18 students,
respectively. Students were first-year undergraduate students of the Department of Communication
and Internet Studies, who registered for the compulsory course: “Introduction to new media” in their
first semester at the Cyprus University of Technology. The course had a weekly, 2-hour lab
component. Students worked collaboratively in dyads on either Mac computers or personal laptops for
approximately two hours focusing on the evaluation criteria for websites, books and journals.
At the end of the session they completed an online evaluation, which indicated that 94.7% of students
were generally satisfied (quite, very or extremely satisfied) with the “evaluation of information” module
of the learning environment (Figure 8).
Figure 8: User satisfaction with the information literacy learning environment (expressed in
percentages)

As shown in Figure 9, 76.3% of students thought that the learning environment was either very or
extremely “informative” and 68,4% of students thought that it was either very or extremely “original”.
Half of the students found the learning environment “helpful” and 60,5% thought that it was “user-
friendly”.

Figure 9: Percentage of students evaluating the extent to which the learning environment on
information literacy was helpful, informative, incomprehensible, original and user-friendly

With respect to whether students were helped by the inclusion of interactive exercises that included
the component of instant feedback in the learning environment, the vast majority of students (92,1%)
as shown in Figure 10, indicated that practice-exercises were helpful at a great extent (quite, very or
extremely helpful).
Figure 10: Students’ evaluation of interactive exercises of the learning environment on information
literacy (in percentages)

As shown in Figure 11, two-thirds of the students (65.8%) indicated that they would like to use the
completed version of the learning environment when it is available. An encouraging finding was that
even though 31.6% of students indicated that they were not sure whether they would like to use the
learning environment in its completed form, only 2,6% of students replied negatively.

Figure 11: Percentage of students expressing willingness to use the completed version of the learning
environment on information literacy

5 DISCUSSION

Preliminary results from the small-scale user evaluation that was conducted were generally positive.
Findings indicated that a student-centered, multimedia learning environment on information literacy
seems to be a fruitful approach for the development of undergraduate students’ information literacy
skills. The environment, which was developed based on instructional design principles, allowed users
to study the material at their own pace, practice evaluation skills, receive instant feedback, self-
evaluate, and interact with other users. Preliminary evidence suggests that the design of such an
interactive learning environment on information literacy provides opportunities for motivating the net
generation students and actively involving them in self-directed learning.
Future research directions refer to the development of all the modules of the learning environment and
the evaluation of its educational value for students at a larger scale. This will be done by measuring
undergraduate students’ information literacy skills at the beginning of the fall semester 2013 using
self-report questionnaires as pretests, having students interact with the learning environment and
measuring their information literacy skills at the end of the fall semester 2013 through post-tests to
compare their performance prior to and after the instructional intervention.

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