Nearly three in four college students say they have somewhat high or very high media literacy skills (72 percent), according to a 2025 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab. Students are less likely to consider their peers media literate; three in five respondents said they have at least somewhat high levels of concern about the spread of misinformation among their classmates.

When asked how colleges and universities could help improve students’ media literacy skills, a majority of Student Voice respondents indicated they want digital resources on increasing media literacy or media literacy–related content and training embedded into the curriculum.

A recently developed course at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering teaches students information literacy principles to help them develop tools to mitigate the harms of online misinformation.

USC offers an interdisciplinary teaching grant that incentivizes cross-campus collaboration and innovative teaching practices. To be eligible for the grant, applications must include at least one full-time faculty member and faculty from more than one school or division. Each grantee receives up to $20,000 to compensate for applicants’ time and work.

In 2023, Helen Choi, a faculty member at USC Viterbi, won the interdisciplinary teaching grant in collaboration with Cari Kaurloto, head of the science and engineering library at USC Libraries, to create a media literacy course specifically for engineering students.

“By focusing on engineering students, we were able to integrate a component of the course that addresses a social issue from an engineering perspective in terms of technical know-how and the professional ethics,” Choi said, which helps students see the relevance of course content to their personal and professional lives.

Students tend to receive most of their news and information on online platforms; Student Voice data found a majority of learners rely on social media for news content (72 percent), and about one in four engage with news apps or news aggregator websites (27 percent).

Choi and Kaurloto’s course, titled Information Literacy: Navigating Digital Misinformation, builds academic research skills, teaches information literacy principles and breaks down the social issue of online misinformation.

“Students examine ways they can navigate online information using their research skills, and then extend that knowledge by considering how they, as prospective engineers, can build technologies that mitigate the harms of online misinformation while enhancing the information literacy of users,” Choi explained.

USC faculty aren’t the only ones noticing a need for more education around engagement with digital information; a growing number of colleges and universities are making students complete a digital literacy course as a graduation requirement.

Choi and Kaurloto co-teach the course, which was first offered in this spring to a class of 25 students.

The students learned to develop effective search strategies and critically examine sources, as well as ethical engineering principles and how to apply them in designing social media platforms, Kaurloto said. Choi and Kaurloto employed active learning pedagogies to give students hands-on and real-life applications including writing, speaking and collaborative coursework.

One assignment the students completed was conducting library research to develop a thesis paragraph on an information literacy topic with a short, annotated bibliography. Students also presented their research to their peers, Kaurloto said.

Learners also engaged in a group digital literacy project, designing a public service campaign that included helpful, research-backed ways to identify misinformation, Choi said. “They then had to launch that campaign on a social media platform, measure its impact, and present on their findings.” Projects ranged from infographics on Reddit to short-form videos on spotting AI-generated misinformation and images on TikTok and Instagram.

Student feedback said they found the course helpful, with many upper-level learners saying they wished they had taken it sooner in their academic career because of the library research skills they gained. They also indicated the course content was applicable in daily life, such as when supporting family members “who students say have fallen down a few internet rabbit holes or who tend to believe everything they see online,” Choi said.

Other librarians have taken note of the course as a model of how to teach information literacy, Choi said.

“We’ve found that linking information literacy with specific disciplines like engineering can be helpful both in terms of building curricula that resonate with students but also for building professional partnerships among faculty,” Choi said. “Many faculty don’t know that university librarians are also experts in information literacy—but they should!”

This fall, Choi and Kaurloto plan to offer two sections of the course with a cap of 24 students per section. Choi hopes to see more first- and second-year engineering students in the course so they can apply these principles to their program.

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