VITL Instruction at Eccles Library

VITL is an emerging trend in general academics that is intended to enhance student competencies in visual, information and technology literacies. The Eccles Library Education Team (ET) recognizes that many of our teaching efforts already incorporate these principles. The ET adopted this framework as an innovative way to promote library resources and services. The ET began looking for ways to integrate these concepts into existing teaching programs, as well as developing new courses.

As an example, during the School of Medicine third year clinical OB and Pediatric rotations library faculty facilitate the use mobile technologies, presentation skills and literature searching and evaluation techniques. Another example is library faculty teach pharmacy students to create their own graphical representation of a disease model that is then integrated it into a paper that the students publish on the Web.

The library’s ET focuses on VITLprinciples when developing new teaching and training sessions. We are identifying examples that can be easily integrated into the various health sciences curriculums and we are actively promoting this model to the curriculum committees and faculty.

The value of VITL is that students gain skills in critical thinking and thoughtful engagement with knowledge that will prepare them to be “smart for life.” VITL provides a fresh prospective and vocabulary related to library instruction services that lends authority to the VITL framework.