The challenge of embedding information literacy as a graduate attribute into engineering and technology courses

Universities and professional bodies require graduates to be skilled practitioners educated to a high standard of competency with proficiency in a diversity of graduate attributes. Some attributes are discipline based while others are of a more generic nature. Proficiency in the generic attribute of Information Literacy can provide the necessary scaffolding to enable practitioners to engage in the digital landscape to identify, locate, evaluate, manage and apply information and acknowledge information sources in their chosen field or profession. Non-technical courses have always been considered better suited to addressing Information Literacy skills. Commonly, assessment in these types of programs consists of written essays, analysing case studies, and report writing; assessment which is generally more applicable to the implicit embedding of Information Literacy skills. Technical courses, generally, rely more heavily on mathematical computations and technical descriptions and drawings to demonstrate knowledge and information and are proving to be more challenging to effectively embed Information Literacy as a learning outcome. The Information Literacy framework consists of six competency levels; essentially identify, find, evaluate, manage, apply, and acknowledge. This paper explores the preliminary process of including Information Literacy implicitly, into assessment items in an undergraduate engineering technical course; Control Systems Analysis and Design.