Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, University of Bristol
Across my teaching at the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, students were expected to undertake engaged research in Bristol, working with and for local communities. For many first-year students, this required rapidly developing information literacy skills that went beyond reliance on general web searches. While the Centre’s transdisciplinary cohort created strong opportunities for collaboration, it also presented challenges in establishing shared research practices.
To address this, I worked with Dr Marika Ziembekis, Innovation Subject Librarian at the University of Bristol, to design and deliver a twelve-week blended teaching programme embedded within the undergraduate innovation curriculum. The programme supported students in developing an agile, practice-led approach to library research, integrating short weekly videos, curated resources, and applied research tasks aligned to their ongoing design projects.
When introduced in February 2021, use of the Innovation subject guide increased by 300 percent compared to the previous year. The guide was accessed 487 times during the teaching block, accounting for 44 percent of its total annual use. Engagement with the video resources was also strong, with an average of 112 views per video and a peak of 210 views for the session on database searching.
In 2021, Dr Ziembekis and I presented this work at the Connecting Bristol Conference, reflecting on our collaborative approach and its impact on student confidence and research practice. Following the pilot, the programme was adopted across multiple units at the Centre and subsequently used in teaching across Engineering, Computer Science, Medicine, and Management at the University of Bristol.
You can watch the video series we made as a youtube playlist below: