Spotlight on Provost's Teaching Award 2016 winner Nazlin Bhimani

Nazlin Bhimani, Research Support & Special Collections Librarian at UCL Institute of Education, received a Provost's Teaching Award at this year's Teaching and Learning Conference.

What did your win highlight?

Higher Education libraries are spending significant amounts of funds in obtaining digital resources. The deluge of online information, both open-access and subscribed information, affects the way in which users search for and access information. Users must understand different types of information resources, how they are curated and the most appropriate ways of searching, locating, accessing, and critically evaluating information, as well as using and managing information.

‘Information and Literature Searching’, a course at the UCL Institute of Education’s Centre for Doctoral Education (CDE), ensures MPhil/PhD students have the necessary information and literacy skills to conduct their literature reviews. It focuses on developing research skills that enable students to find gaps in the literature by understanding how knowledge is created and curated and to make connections in related subject areas in order to develop their research imaginations. The course is underpinned by findings from various user behaviour studies, including Researchers of Tomorrow (2012), a three-year study on doctoral students and their research behaviour, and the IOE’s Digital Literacies as a Postgraduate Attribute (2013) study.

The course also emphasises research in historiographical literature which is particularly pertinent for educational research. The learning outcomes ensure that doctoral students do not rely heavily on secondary resources but investigate primary sources, including historical materials and datasets so they become confident with resources which may be available in other libraries and information systems. They learn to become critically aware of ways in which information is curated so that they are able to appraise it for relevance, bias, authenticity and currency. In addition, students are trained to make full use of new technologies, including the use of RSS to keep updated on research published in their fields. They are encouraged to reflect and write about their research on their blogs and are encouraged to use social media to share, network and collaborate with other researchers.

The course has received consistently high ratings, with many students stating it is one of the most useful courses offered by the CDE.

What does this award mean to you?

The award is an acknowledgment that information and digital literacy is an important aspect of researcher development for doctoral students and that librarians are key players in designing and providing this type of training.   

What new ways of teaching are you looking into at the moment?

In order to encourage more engagement among the Institute’s online PhD students, I ask the students to summarise the key points from the discussions following each task. They work in small groups or pairs for this element. 

What advice would you give to a colleague who would like to be more innovative in their teaching?

I would generally encourage more collaborative working across teams to enrich the teaching experience, enhance the students’ learning and provide graduates and early career researchers with the necessary information and digital literacy skills required in the workplace and for lifelong learning.  Librarians have traditionally been custodians of information but their roles have evolved to information curators and educators.

Student perspective

“The course was extremely useful for getting a comprehensive overview of the abundant available tools for literature searching, for understanding its strategic importance in our research and for learning how to cope emotionally with this potentially overwhelming process. Nazlin guided us with an admirable balance between sharing her expertise in well- prepared classes and allowing us to learn hands-on in a very participatory environment. I highly recommend this course to all research students, even if they’re experienced researchers, because you get a lot of practical tips that boost efficiency and you learn about the specific resources available at UCL and its broad network. “ Andrea Detmer Latorre, course participant