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A group of faculty and staff from across Syracuse University are working toward making sure SU students graduate with 21st century skills. 

The University Senate Ad-Hoc Committee on Shared Competencies created the ILTA Community of Practice, said Kelly Delevan, an information literacy librarian and leader of the group, in an email to The Daily Orange.

ILTA stands for information literacy and technological agility, which the community is looking to implement throughout SU.

LaVerne Gray, a group member and assistant professor in the School of Information Studies, described information literacy as the ability to locate, find and analyze information in a technological context.

Technological agility, the second part of the group’s title, is slightly different. Jian Qin — a leader in the community and director for the library and information science master’s program —  described it as “the ability to quickly adapt to technology changes and learn new technology rather than be afraid of it.”

ILTA is one of six competencies the university has set out as “institutional learning goals that enhance undergraduate education through an integrated learning approach,” according to the competency policy’s website. Other skills include “critical and creative thinking” and “communication skills.”

In the university’s initial research, it found that, out of the “182 undergraduate major and stand-alone minor” programs, only 43% address information literacy and technological agility. It was the lowest rate of the university’s six competencies. 

Delevan is looking to change that.

“Our end result is a clear definition of what skills, attitudes and dispositions students must develop in order to be information literate and technologically agile,” she said in an email to The D.O. 

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The changes do not necessarily mean freshmen will have to take a new mandatory course, Qin said. Some faculty will adjust their current course syllabi to fit new standards.

It should “feel like part of the class, part of the course content rather than part of the course evaluation,” she said.

To implement ILTA properly into university classrooms, faculty members are going to have to work to evaluate students’ ability in information technology and ability, Qin said. Part of this evaluation will come through a rubric, but further evaluation of students won’t be one-sided, she added.

“We’ll look at the results and see whether the rubric is a good instrument for assessing the ILTA  level of students and how well they can be integrated into the syllabi for individual faculty to implement,” she said.

The group contains librarians, archivists and professors in fields ranging from the humanities to engineering, which alters how the community looks at ILTA’s implementation across the campus, Gray said.

“When discussing different areas of what the competency should look like, what language should we use? The voice of whatever discipline is represented, what does this look like for them in their school or college?” she said. 

This upcoming spring semester, 14 faculty members will be in the first round of ILTA teaching at the undergraduate level, Qin said. The faculty members will have to go through training and debriefing sessions following their course’s completion.

“I want our students to be able to critically evaluate information resources and systems, use information ethically and responsibly, and advocate for information equity for all,” Delevan said.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this post stated that only 43% of the 182 undergraduate major and stand-alone minor programs effectively taught information literacy and technological agility, when only 43% of said programs address information literacy and technological agility. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on September 20, 2021 at 12:14 am

Contact Kyle: kschouin@syr.edu | @Kyle_Chouinard