2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The information landscape of today’s workplace is very different from the one our students experience in academia. As such, it is critical for students graduating and entering the transdisciplinary, information-rich workplace to have solid information literacy skills and understand how to seek out and use information from traditional and non-traditional sources. With the support of an internal grant, librarians and an engineering technology professor at a large public research university developed and piloted a suite of micro-learning information literacy modules with micro-credentialing for undergraduate students. The topics covered in the modules include (1) effective information-gathering strategies, (2) competitive analysis, (3) patent information, (4) industry standards, and (5) informed communication. The foundational modules, created with stakeholder feedback from industry professionals, entrepreneurs, instructors, and students, are designed for instructors to use in their classes without direct librarian intervention. The micro-credentialing component allows students to share the digital badges they earn with potential employers via LinkedIn and other platforms. The modules and content are designed to be used by instructors across many disciplines as a tool to improve student outcomes. In this paper, we explain our module development and course integration processes and share selected results from a pilot integration in an engineering technology course and a business course. The selected results include counts of awarded micro-credentials and responses from a student perception survey. The findings will be useful for librarians and other educators interested in scalable approaches to integrating information literacy content focused on the university to workplace transition.