Assessing Information Literacy Competencies among University Students via MOOC

Students need information literacy to get through higher education and into the workplace. This increased significance has resulted in the changing roles of academic librarians, especially in the provision of information literacy instruction and in developing content for information literacy modules, which must be relevant, detailed, and cater to the needs of learners. This research was conducted to investigate the proficiency of self-directed learning among Malaysian university students in information literacy. A tailored Information Literacy Massive Open Online Course (IL MOOC) was designed according to the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Students' information literacy skills were assessed with the University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries Information Literacy Disposition Rubrics and analysed with descriptive statistics. Findings indicated that the ability to understand how authority is embedded in a wide range of contexts was the dimension of authority that students were best at recognising. Nonetheless, least developing performance persisted in five more of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education categories among the majority of respondents. These results provide important implications for academic librarians, emphasising the particular aspects of information literacy instruction that should take priority. The findings also indicate that there could be certain factors, external or internal to students, determining students’ levels of involvement in the MOOC content, attending learning activities, submitting assignments, and ultimately completing the course.