I’ll continue blog the session that I chaired this morning at the i3 conference. Hesham Azmi talked about Critical appraisal of information literacy programs: an evidence based approach to assess an Information and Research Skills course in Qatar University. QU is the largest, and only state supported, university in Qatar. They have 9000 students, mostly undergraduate. They have done well in getting information literacy into the core curriculum and identified in the core learning outcomes for students. There is information about this in another Italics article, namelyAzmi, H. (2006) “Teaching Information Literacy Skills: A case study of the QUcore program in Qatar University” Italics, 15 (4). http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/italics/vol5iss4/azmi.pdfHesham has used the ACRL Characteristics of programs of information literacy that illustrate best practices guidelines to evaluate the programme (these can be found at http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlstandards/characteristics.htm). As he discovered, there is surprisingly little in the literature reporting on use of the guidelines (or indeed any whole-programme evaluation). He gave a glimpse of how their programme measured up – I think he said that they matched over 50 of the 80+ criteria. To investigate their programme they examined relevant documents, and are gathering data via questionnaire and interview. They are just analysing things now, and he intended to put a ppt with even more results on the conference webpage. I think this will be very interesting. …

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