Enhancing Engineering Students' Knowledge of Information Literacy and Ethics Through an Interactive Online Learning Module

Enhancing information literacy and ethics awareness has long been recognized as one of the important tasks in engineering education. Current practices of fostering engineering students’ information literacy and ethics mainly include formal coursework on information literacy and the seminars given by subject librarians. However, few electrical engineering program core courses strive to enrich students’ understanding of information literacy and ethics in the teaching of their respective core contents. In this study, we explore an alternative to the current practices, which is the integration of information literacy and ethics training into core courses. Specifically, we developed an interactive online learning module on information literacy and ethics based on a seminar given by a subject librarian for electrical engineering in spring 2009. The module was delivered, as a course component, in two undergraduate and two graduate core courses in electrical engineering in spring 2009 and fall 2009. Participants were required to take a pretest on the knowledge of information literacy and ethics prior to the start of the module. In addition, they were required to take a posttest after their completion of the module. The effectiveness of this module on students’ knowledge of information literacy and ethics was evaluated by the analysis of pretest and post test scores.