In fall 2025, UCR Library and the Division of Undergraduate Education launched the course Information Now: Current Topics in Information & Society (UGRD 40).
The two unit, in-person course was taught out of the Library's Teaching and Learning Department during the 2025/2026 school year, with a different librarian designing and teaching the class each quarter.
The idea grew out of a partnership between the Library and the Division of Undergraduate Education, which was building out a slate of one- and two-unit courses to help students graduate on time while filling a gap in campus offerings. Britt Foster, UCR Library’s Director of Teaching and Learning, helped shape that vision. “I was interested in a more scaffolded and programmatic information literacy curriculum for the university,” Britt said. Taught as a “topic” course, each librarian designed their own version of the course around their own discipline and a shared set of learning outcomes, rather than a fixed syllabus. “How they teach the outcomes and through what lens is up to them,” Britt said, “what’s important is hitting the learning goals.” That structure, she added, gives students “a really good opportunity to get introduced to the information formats that they would use as upper division students and as professionals once they graduate.”
In fall 2025, STEM Teaching Librarian Mary-Michelle Moore built her course, Optimize Your Research Skills, around iterative research questions, data literacy, and a final poster session modeled on how scientists share early work. “I was so impressed with my students' final poster session,” Mary-Michelle said. She also had students keep a reflective research journal throughout the quarter, an assignment she says helped them see how each week's work was building toward their final project.
In winter 2026, Arts and Humanities Teaching Librarian Robin M. Katz titled the course Understanding the Past, leaning on primary sources such as physical newspapers, archival collections, and she even took the class on a field trip to UCR’s California Museum of Photography in downtown Riverside. Robin sees real value in a full quarter with the same students, rather than the one-time library sessions librarians usually teach. “The value of this kind of quarter-long course for us is it's not just a one and done,” Katz said. “To be able to have that kind of ongoing practice is really valuable.”
Area and Interdisciplinary Studies Teaching Librarian Mary Rodríguez-Sweeney closed out the year in spring 2026 with the course Knowledge, Race, & Power, giving students wide latitude to choose their own research topics. One of their favorite assignments centered on credibility and bias. “That's something students always have questions about, even in their writing classes,” Mary said. Watching students learn to spot bias in a source, and get excited about it, was one of the most rewarding parts of the quarter for them.
All three librarian instructors landed on the same core assignment, an annotated bibliography, helping prepare students for later writing literature reviews in upper division courses or graduate school.
One of the clearest wins from year one came from Mary-Michelle’s class. A student in the class carried a topic they developed in Optimize Your Research Skills into deeper independent research and is now a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, a program aimed at preparing undergraduate students for graduate school. She's also started working in the Library.
Mary-Michelle, Robin, and Mary made the most of a ten-week quarter in their own way. Year one already did what it set out to do: give UCR students a place to build research skills tied to their own interests and disciplines, something few other UC campuses currently offer as an active course, alongside the information literacy instruction already built into Writing 10 and 20.
UGRD 40 returns this fall for its second year. Mary-Michelle Moore is back with a new topic for fall 2027, The Informed Imagination: Building Tomorrow with Today's Research, which asks students to work in interdisciplinary teams to build a speculative future world grounded in real research, while digging into contemporary debates over algorithmic bias, data privacy, and information ethics. The Library's Teaching and Learning Department is also developing Search It Up, a complementary, more introductory research skills course aimed at reaching more students earlier in their time at UCR.
Questions about UGRD 40? Reach out to LibTeach@ucr.edu.