75 lessons learned for enhancing information literacy programs

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study has the aim of expanding lessons learned that were originally detected for information literacy (INFOLIT) programs in Ibero-American universities (from Latin America, Spain and Portugal), this paper presents lessons learned for enhancing equivalent programs offered by other universities around the world. Design/methodology/approach As this paper is a comparative literature review, the methodology involved three stages. Initially, a documentary analysis was carried out to identify the texts published during the past five years – since 2013 – reporting a categorization of experiences and cases of international INFOLIT programs and their corresponding lessons learned. Second, we conducted a content analysis of these publications to uncover the classification, identification and frequency of the lessons learned. A third comparative step consisted of analyzing the similarities of these lessons when compared to those reported in similar research on Ibero-American universities (Uribe-Tirado, 2013). Findings From the 75 lessons learned from INFOLIT programs in Ibero-American universities, 65 lessons (87 per cent) were identified as also present in universities elsewhere. These similarities give an account of the possibilities for collaborative learning and benchmarking that INFOLIT programs could achieve with regard to content, pedagogy, learning objects and evaluation if there were more networking and more common participation in sharing experiences, with appropriate adaptations to contextual, technological and idiomatic variations. Originality/value As a comparative literature review, this paper makes a significant contribution to the international advancement of INFOLIT in higher education, as it correlates the lessons learned from INFOLIT programs in Ibero-American universities with those from other countries. This provides a global view of the lessons learned about INFOLIT, which to date have not been reported with such a wide scope and number of lessons.