Quality Time: Teaching Students to Fish

“Do we give students the fish, or do we teach them to fish?” often asks Donna Hall, Design Team Coordinator, regarding assignment design. In our classes, the answer may vary based on the course and the type of assignment, but as part of our overall goal to develop students with skills in information literacy, research, and writing, we want to teach our students to fish.

One type of assignment I like to employ in my classes is student-generated content. History is a very broad subject and rather than dictating every detail they are expected to learn in long lectures, I guide students to select topics that fall within certain parameters but interest them. They share their final product with classmates in a discussion or other tool. The students not only learn content from each other’s projects but get to compare their assignments to the work of others in a conscious or unconscious self-evaluation.

One example is a research and writing project that requires students to locate primary and secondary sources on a historical term. In a discussion, they post a brief description of the term, their cited sources, and what we will find useful at each source. Additionally, while working on the discussion, students may ask the instructor or each other questions about sources, citation, or content, building a sense of community. What I have noticed is that by doing the project openly and seeing each others’ examples of how they put research and writing together, the quality of the individual student’s work greatly improves and they become self motivated to be experts on their piece of content.

Want to learn more on student-generated content? Here are two web resources to get you started: http://senerlearning.com/projects/student-generated-content
http://senerlearning.com/category/blog-topics/student-generated-content
Please share with us student-generated content assignments you employ in your courses in the CCCOnline Community Cultivating Excellence discussion.

Quality Time is a series of posts concerning course quality issues, best practices, and/or CCCOnline policy.

Research and Writing Toolkit Webinar

Have you ever wished for a set of quick links to assign to your students for brush-up help on research skills, avoiding plagiarism, or writing in general?

We’re happy to say we’ve been working on such a project, and we seek your feedback! Come to our webinar at 1:00 p.m. this Friday, Oct. 22, to learn about the Research and Writing Toolkit and share your thoughts.

Quality Time: Fostering Information Literacy

Do your students tend to rely on Wikipedia or Google for scholarly research? If so, and if this concerns you, you’re certainly not alone. As we face vast amounts of information so instantly, easily accessible, our encouraging students to examine how they locate and use that information becomes increasingly important – if increasingly difficult at times.

Our CCCOnline Librarian, Mary Cash, defines information literacy as “the set of abilities that allow a person to recognize a need for information, to search for and find the necessary information, and to best know how to use that information.” The Association of College and Research Libraries stresses information literacy’s worth as forming “the basis for lifelong learning” and empowering learners with “greater control over their own learning” (read more at the source here). In addition, information literacy has garnered a fair amount of recent attention from educators at all levels.

Our question to you: how do you address information literacy in your courses? If you have found particular activities or assignments to be effective, please share with colleagues. Post your comments in the appropriate discussion in the CCCOnline Community.

Quality Time is a series of posts concerning course quality issues, best practices, and/or CCCOnline policy.

Visit the Recorded Webinars

Each month we conduct at least one webinar on pedagogical or technical skills. On Friday Oct 1, Turnitin joined us to do their presentation from the conference. As was true at the conference, the presentation was very well received by the attendees.

BUT, what can you do if Friday at 1pm doesn’t work for you? ANSWER: We record our webinars and post them on the wiki Webinar Archive page within a few days of the event. Over the last couple of years we have built quite a list of resources on a variety of topics that you may enjoy.

My favorite part of listening to a webinar is that I can pause the presentation, speed it up, rewind it, or stop it and return to it later. I can also run the webinar and try what a presenter is demonstrating immediately in my sandbox course.

If you haven’t checked this resource out lately, please do so. If you have ideas for additional webinar topics that you would like this year, please post your comments in the CCCOnline Community’s Cultivating Excellence discussion; look for thread “Visit the Recorded Webinars”. Also, please share which webinars you’ve found most helpful and informative whether you attended in person or listened to the recording. We love getting feedback and want to schedule these events to best meet your needs.

Also, check out the Upcoming webinar page for events we have scheduled this fall.