November 7, 2014 | SharkAdmin NVC dedicated Employee Development Day to building an understanding and awareness of its Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) focused on information literacy. A new QEP plan is an essential component for NVC to receive reaffirmation next year from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. The QEP, also known as inF– USE, will teach students how to find, ethically use, synthesize and evaluate information in their classes and reinforce those skills in their co-curricular programs. The QEP defines this as: Find credible and relevant information through ethical and effective navigation of internet resources Use critical thinking skills to discern and analyze information Synthesize information by effectively gathering and integrating academic and college resource material into an ePortfolio Evaluate and manage acquired Information Literacy Skills through a self-evaluation process. The opening session was led by two Trinity University scholars sharing their own successful experience with information literacy. The presenters asked faculty and staff to consider three main questions: What is information literacy?; How does it benefit students, teachers, and staff to understand information literacy?; And what are our shared goals as a college for the QEP? The presenters shared definitions of information literacy and characteristics of students with strong information literacy skills such as the ability to identify patterns from a range of resources, becoming a patient and persistent researcher, integrating contextual organizational details, and defining information problems. The presenters also shared approaches used at Trinity to build effective information literacy skills. These included: creating specific, stated learning outcomes—(including co-curricular) developing evaluation rubrics creating scaffolding assignments requiring student developed annotated bibliographies creating and assessing student reflective assignments They shared assessment data showing improvement in the Trinity classes. One great takeaway was having the presenters remind us that by having the entire campus understand and participate in the QEP, all faculty and staff were building and sharing a common information literacy vocabulary for our students. Dozens of other sessions were held throughout the day for faculty and staff, and the day closed with a group of well-attended wellness sessions. I would like to acknowledge the QEP Team spearheaded by assistant professor of English, Denise Tolan, for their hard work and dedication to gather research from all of our stakeholders to include students, faculty, staff, community partners, businesses and media in selecting our QEP. They were also instrumental in planning our Employee Development Day. To learn more about our QEP, click here: http://alamo.edu/nvc/about-us/qep/
