Mary Barden

Until recently, academic skills support at the University of Bolton was fragmented and compartmentalised, sometimes leaving students confused as to where to go for help. In addition the focus was on remedial support. We have developed a new vision: the Learning Excellence Achievement Pathway (LEAP). This new learning development strategy has the objective of developing a skills offering that is comprehensive, co-ordinated, and trackable, offering an inclusive, personalised and relevant approach to learning development. A new Learning Development Framework (LDF) identifies skills students need to progress through their programmes. It demonstrates a holistic approach, recognising four key areas relating to the acquisition of skills, knowledge and experience: (1) academic development, (2) personal development, (3) digital literacy and (4) student engagement.
LEAP support is delivered face-to-face and online. This paper will focus on the challenge of providing the online support – LEAP Online. The University’s existing online skills tutorial, BISSTO, is being transformed into LEAP Online, offering content reflecting the new LDF. Content included will be differentiated into levels designed to engage students of all abilities. LEAP Online includes badged assessments providing students with evidence demonstrating engagement with LEAP.
This paper will demonstrate the challenges, achievements and opportunities offered by the LEAP Online project: (1) how the technical challenges of providing content, activities and assessments online have been overcome; (2) how students will work with their personal tutors to agree a LEAP Action Plan; (3) how LEAP Online is ideally suited to provide content for both embedded and extra-curricular skills support.
The successful implementation of the strategy, underpinned by LEAP Online, will ensure that the University’s skills provision is transformed from a deficit model, to one which encourages and champions excellence.

Information literacy (IL) skills, the ability to search for, analyse and use information effectively, are key skills in achieving academic success as well as contributing to factors such as employability. The University’s IL framework was developed in 2008. It was to be formally embedded into the University curriculum, but this has only been achieved on a limited basis.
As responsibility for IL is included in the Library remit, a solution was to incorporate IL within an existing library service. The redevelopment of BISSTO in 2013 provided an opportunity to include interactive IL tests at appropriate points in the tutorial, covering all aspects of the framework. An IL section was also included to provide general information about IL for academics and students.
The first part of the session will outline the content changes. The second part will focus on how BISSTO can be used in the classroom to improve student competencies. The outcome of this session is that participants should know how to use BISSTO successfully in the curriculum to improve student information literacy competencies.