Rayyan is a free, online application to assist researchers with systematic review methodology and meta-analysis projects. Rayyan is one of many software products of QCRI, Qatar Computing Research Institute, a creative and innovative entity of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, similar in many ways to the U.S. Department of Education. Rayyan allows users to upload citations and full-text articles as a part of a single review, or the ability to create several review projects, or even collaborate on publicly available projects. Rayyan aims to offer researchers a one stop dashboard to work through the details of their processes while also allowing their collaborators the ability to see each other's work. Here we will review Rayyan on 7 criteria: customization, relevance, investment, functionality, searching, collaboration, and support. Customization What you see is what you get with Rayyan. It is a rather simplistic interface with not a lot of distractions. Conversely, the platform does not allow for a lot of sophisticated tailoring of how one interacts with datasets. The one exception is the tagging that is allowed within a single review can be color-coded. Relevance Rayyan is a website that can be relevant to any discipline or project team seeking to do a systematic review or meta-analysis of existing scholarship. Systematic reviews were once largely limited to medical and health care researchers. However, more disciplines are adopting this methodology to investigate their own bodies of work, including engineering and the sciences. Investment/real cost Use of the Rayyan website requires no monetary investment. This is particularly promising in a field where similar products have fees per license, per collaborator, per month, or even per
Microcredentialing, or badging, has become a popular way to certify achievement in a variety of fields, perhaps most visibly in information technology. Higher education institutions have started to investigate badges as a way to certify curricular and cocurricular activities and provide a more detailed description of the skills, abilities, and experiences of students as they go through their college years. Microcredentialing also provides an opportunity to assess and recognize student learning outcomes across multiple courses, rather than requiring students to meet complex goals within one course.At the authors' institution, the College of Technology recently formulated a competencybased degree program that includes information literacy outcomes for students. In order to track student progress, the college decided to use a badging system, and librarians were asked to create and facilitate an information literacy badge for the college's inaugural course for first-year students. The libraries have also been involved in working with a more conventional, i.e., credit-based, course for first year students in the college, which meets the university's foundational core curriculum requirements for information literacy. This paper describes the process of developing an information literacy curriculum for a competency-based program and provides a rough comparison of student outcomes between the traditional and competency-based course offerings.
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