Reframing from the ground up: Redesigning a credit-bearing information literacy course using the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education

Abstract

LIB 1500 is a three-credit information literacy course offered by the University Library at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly-Pomona), which is taught by faculty librarians. The course was developed during the 2014–15 academic year and has been offered continuously since. While targeted primarily toward freshmen, in the course inevitably include a number of sophomores and upper-level students seeking to fulfill their lifelong learning General Education requirement, for which LIB 1500 is one of several options. While the development of LIB 1500 has been a labor of love, by the end of Spring Quarter 2017, those of us involved in teaching the class had noticed that the course was becoming dated and needed a complete overhaul. Therefore, during the 2017–18 academic year, librarians at Cal Poly-Pomona fundamentally redesigned LIB 1500 to reflect the threshold concepts described in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. In doing so, we learned valuable lessons about course structure, applied learning, and the iterative nature of course revision.