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.