Abstract:

Information literacy is one of the most solved and discussed topics that should have a place in secondary education. The situation in the Czech Republic (but not only in the Czech Republic) is very problematic at the level of secondary schools. Teachers lack study materials, the topic is developing rapidly, and its adequate mastery is necessary for further social and educational activities of students.

My research aimed to analyze the needs and expectations of secondary schools (there are 5 in total in the study) in the field of development of information literacy and with the help of various research tools to analyze their needs. Both the needs of teachers and students need to be well understood to design an online high school course (https://kisk.phil.muni.cz/onlife/ucitel).

In the research, I worked with several different methods, which together created the task for the creation of the course itself. There were eight focus groups, with 42 students. A total of 95 students (these overlapping groups) then went through an open-ended pretest, focusing on AASL items, which are a set of competency domains for secondary schools.

In the case of teachers, we conducted eight semi-structured interviews that answered three research questions:
1. How does the teacher perceive the role of information literacy in the competence profile of himself and his pupils?
2. How is the teacher preparing to teach information literacy?
3. In his view, what would improve the quality of teaching information literacy? What is the teacher missing?

The second systematic research tool was the Q-methodology used in a strongly qualitative way. Teachers were divided into two random groups (4 and 4), using AASL-derived cards as Q-tips. The first four were supposed to make a commented order of what information literacy should look like, trying to differentiate individual elements in importance. The second four then described the current situation and tied their statements to the existing students.

The last research tool was the analysis of the school curriculum of three selected schools from my project. All these data showed specific topics, as well as areas and approaches that need to be covered in the online course and allowed the first prototype to be made available to these schools. The development of this prototype was again consulted with a total of 5 teachers who again interfered in its final form.

In this paper, we focus on both the key partial findings of the individual phases and the final assignment, which was composed for the creation of an experimental course with an experimental curriculum for the development of information literacy of secondary school students.

The research clearly shows the importance of participatory methods in curriculum design as well as in partial courses, as it creates space for creating a useful and functional solution that responds to real existing problems and needs of the target group.

Keywords:

Design process, information literacy, mix design, online course, e-learning, MOOC.