The Learning Skills Team are involved in curriculum design from planning through to delivery. They provide advice on collections and services at the programme proposal stage; suggest where support or interventions for academic skills, information literacies and digital capabilities can be embedded in the course at the validation stage; and offer support with delivery of activities.

They are all associates or fellows of the Higher Education Academy, as well as members of professional associations such as the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) and Academic Learning Developers in HE (ALDinHE) and have a good understanding of curriculum design and teaching methodologies.

Working with professional frameworks such as SCONUL, ACRL and JISC; as well as professional Standards; QAA benchmarks; professional competencies; and CCCU policy, they design and deliver a programme of workshops tailored to your needs.

These workshops or interventions might include embedded activities into each level of all courses as part of the module timetable, as well as the use of flipped learning through the Learning Skills Hub.

The team can deliver:

• face-to-face through workshops or bite-size talks,
• online using Blackboard or MS Teams,
• short-courses with a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous,
• or sessions co-taught with academics.

Each activity is targeted at different levels with a scaffolding approach to ease the transition between academic levels as teaching and assessments progress.

Experience shows that workshops are most successful when integrated into the course and focus on how to find relevant resources for a particular assignment. They can be on different topics depending on the needs of the students for example introduction to LibrarySearch, key subject resources, planning an assignment, searching tips and techniques, evaluating information, writing a report, research tools and techniques.

The Learning Skills Team can assist you with designing formative assessments including bibliographical exercises, reflective writing, critiquing sources, and skills-based quizzes. They employ a range of techniques in their teaching such as online polls, surveys, and quizzing tools, and can provide flipped learning activities for Blackboards and PebblePad.