WIP: Micro-Credentialing for the First Year: Creating a Digital Badge for Engineering Information Literacy

This Works-in-Progress Paper focuses on a micro-credentialing project through the creation of a digital badge for first year engineering students to teach basic research and information literacy skills. At the authors’ university, all engineering students are required to take a first-year design course. Historically, engineering librarians approach information literacy skill introductions through in-class instructional sessions, affectionally termed, “one-shots.” The authors teach an average of 40 sections each semester, making it difficult to reach every class with the current libraries staffing model. This leaves some students at a disadvantage, lacking foundational research skills in their first year and requiring librarians to cover this basic material in some upper-level courses, in lieu of more advanced topics. This paper shares progress on a micro-credentialing project underway to asynchronously teach engineering first year students basic research and information literacy skills. With the assistance of their College of Engineering’s education center and office of digital learning, the authors received a grant to develop an asynchronous digital badge designed to both replace the previous in-class instruction and complement regular engineering coursework. This badge allows all students in all first-year design courses to receive the same instruction. The authors share lessons learned while creating and designing of a digital badge in course management software. They also look toward future testing and implementation during the 2024-2025 academic year.