Teaching information literacy with the Lerninformationssystem.

In 2001 scientists of the Sozialforschungsstelle Dortmund Landesinstitut (a federal state institute working in the, field of labour research, located in Dortmund, Germany) reported on barriers in using digital scientific information at German universities and other institutes of higher education'. (1) They came to the conclusion that information literacy among German students had to be improved, and suggested several measures to be taken, one of them being that

    Courses and learning modules for professional use of  digital    scientific information must be conceived, developed, applied  and    assessed. Therefore, intra- and interuniversity cooperation of  lecturers, libraries and information brokers is absolutely    necessary.  (2) 

In response to these suggestions and in connection with the research funding program 'New media in education' (3) of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the universities of Dusseldorf, Cologne, Hamburg and Dresden have been developing a learning system, initially for medical science. For German universities this system is available for free.

The skeletal structure of the learning system is called Lerninformationssystem (learning information system, below LIS). By contrast with the learning content, which is specific for each subject, the LIS is applicable to all fields of knowledge. In the Heinrich Heine University of Dusseldorf it is currently used for web-based training in medical subjects such as Coronary Heart Diseases (4) (which it was originally developed for), classes on social sciences or digital photogrammetry.

When Dusseldorf University and Regional Library (ULBD) decided to create a learner's program to promote the acquisition of information literacy, particularly for the newly developed BA and MA curricula in accordance with the Stefi-Studie, (5) it settled on this program, LIS.

Consequently, in the summer of 2004 ULBD started working on an online tutorial…