Helen Howard gave this interesting presentation on what Leeds University have been doing to develop IL with their postgraduate students. They run a half day workshop for about 20 students, reinforced by open workshops on topics such as Endnote, current awareness and copyright. The half day approach allows the team to use mixed teaching methods. I was interested in the pre workshop assessment. It seemed to incorporate similar things to my approach at Newcastle – an IL self assessment, information about the PhD topic etc, but has given Helen useful data to report too.
Helen also raised some questions:
* how can we support PhD students later on in their research? This is something we have recently been discussing at Newcastle too, maybe as optional workshops on specific topics.
* can we provide an online alternative? We have ResIN at Newcastle but it’s just a set of web pages, no interaction or guided “training”. We also put materials into Blackboard for the PG programmes and some of my colleagues run a blog for them. What else could we do?
* how can we deal with numbers involved?This is a big issue – it’s very timeconsuming to develop and deliver a quality programme, especially to relatively small groups – lots of repetition.

Chester town centre, Easter. (well, it’s near Liverpool!)