Build AI and information literacy through targeted library support

To become better researchers and effective learners, students need to understand how to critically assess information sources. This skill is becoming increasingly essential as more students turn to AI for help with assessments. 

Many are aware of the risks associated with doing so – academic misconduct and inaccurate or biased outputs, to name a few – and are looking to universities for guidance on when to use it, and how to use it responsibly. By improving information and AI literacy, we not only encourage critical use of AI but we build students’ confidence to use it effectively. 

One way to do this is to partner with specialists within your institution to deliver upskilling programmes. We worked with our digital skills lead, Jenny McGarvey, on ours, and here is what worked well for us.

Student-centred support that builds on existing AI knowledge

Library and information professionals have long led on and supported information and other literacy skills development to build students’ criticality. To build on our support and teach students about responsible GenAI use, we deliver a series of extracurricular AI workshops and provide online resources aligned with our institution’s AI policy. 

By providing foundational support that is accessible to students with little or no existing knowledge of AI, learners can build on what they already know. 

Topics we cover in these workshops include:

• understanding AI
• prompt generation
• ethical AI use, among many others.

Activities are collaborative rather than facilitator-led to encourage students to share their AI knowledge. This can build autonomy and encourage peer learning.

Alongside these activities, we recommend providing online resources to prompt self-directed learning. Bite-sized videos, practical activities, review quizzes and interactive workbooks are great places to start, and academic tutors can easily incorporate these into existing curricula. To increase engagement, upload these resources to an external webpage that does not require students to log in to view them. 

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Playful, peer-led workshops

We have found that co-creating AI literacy support with students reduces anxiety around use and fosters more open conversations. Sessions built around collaborative, non-judgemental discussions, rather than didactic instruction, work well, and should include activities that teach students how to use GenAI tools effectively while building awareness of their limitations.

We recruited a student intern to deliver workshops centred around peer-to-peer learning. The workshops incorporated playful activities such as prompt engineering relays, where students worked in groups to test and edit prompts to improve GenAI outputs. 

Another activity that worked well required participants to prompt the tools to contradict themselves or collapse their arguments by probing them with questions about their output, such as “how do you know that?”. 

To encourage students to experiment during these kinds of activities, we recommend framing it in a “safe-to-fail” environment in which failure is a valuable learning experience, ensuring participation is not linked to academic assessment or progression. 

Our students told us that they valued the opportunities for practical learning in these workshops. They also said that having a facilitator present to answer questions increased their confidence to use GenAI critically, ethically and responsibly. 

Drawing on and building staff AI knowledge

A joined-up approach to skills training can increase the impact of AI literacy efforts. For us, this involves drawing on knowledge and skills within and across teams to develop AI literacy alongside wider library and study skills. 

While creating opportunities for staff discussion around AI is easier said than done in a time-poor environment, conversations can pave the way for exploration and improved ways of working with AI. Such collaboration not only enables staff to learn more about GenAI and gain confidence to use it but it shows them that they are not alone in their concerns. Conscious that we needed to develop our library team’s AI literacy, we organised an AI research assistant “show and tell” day to explore new tools, share concerns and collaborate on new ideas and workflows.

We are continuing to expand the reach of our student support and developing partnerships with academic colleagues to embed AI literacy into our curriculum. As part of this work, we are integrating principles for ethical AI use into our undergraduate and postgraduate teaching on literature reviews to ensure that students understand the implications of AI use on information retrieval and research reproducibility.

Some might suggest that the rise in use of literature-searching “AI research assistants” could replace the need for information and digital literacy experts like us, but in fact the opposite is true: the limitations of these tools make the work we do even more important. We’re excited to continue learning and building with the support of colleagues across our institution, and the sector more widely.

Amy McEwan and Isobel Eddyshaw are academic liaison librarians and Jenny McGarvey is digital skills lead, all at the University of Exeter.

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