VIKO – Help with Academic Writing Guiding students from research question to bibliography!

In Spring 2017, the University Library of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) launched VIKO, the redesigned tool for fostering information literacy and academic writing skills. VIKO (Veien til InformasjonsKOmpetanse), in English ‘Your guide to information literacy’, has been widely used by NTNU students and teachers for 12 years. The digital and technological development as well as new requirements for information literacy skills and academic writing skills have made it necessary to revise this tool. A working group at NTNU University Library developed and carried out an electronic survey to find out the specific needs of students, teachers, and researchers. We involved our users in developing our information literacy tool to give them a more useful user experience. We asked questions: Is information about academic writing something you need? And in case your response is yes, where do you go to find information about this? What kind of content do you desire? What should the technical platform and design be? The answers received told that “Yes!” this was something both students and teachers wanted. They was eager to get all the information they needed in their studies in one place. Results of this survey and additional depth interviews with students and staff have been the initial point for both the updated content and the new graphical design of VIKO. To accommodate the wish for giving them all information in one place, all content is now placed on the University Intranet together with all other information relevant for the students. A theme page helps students navigate in the content about academic writing. And, instead of “VIKO”, the site includes the name, “Academic Writing”, to gives the students a better understanding of the content. The content of the redesigned tool is structured in four topics: defining a research topic, finding sources, structuring your text, and using and citing sources. Each of these topics has several subtopics. When updating the content and redesigning the web interface the focus has been on using not only text but also pictures and videos. We know that people have different ways of learning, so offering content for different learning styles like visual learning, auditory learning, and read/write learning will contribute to improving the learning outcomes. The poster will present NTNU’s redesigned online information literacy tool, VIKO – Help with Academic Writing, and will describe both improvements and challenges for the new product. It will also show how to link videos as learning objects to the university’s learning management system, Blackboard. Keywords: academic writing skills, information literacy, NTNU University Library