Student Profile Images

Karen Kaemmerling, Social Science Division Chair, is guest speaker again this week. 

Is this your student?

Many of our students want to feel a connection to their fellow classmates and instructor.  One way to build a sense of community among your students is to include a profile image of yourself that will appear in the Discussions and Classlist, and to encourage your students to include images in their own profiles.  Here is the link from the student wiki to help students set up their Profile Pictures: http://at.ccconline.org/students/wiki/How_do_I_change_my_Profile_picture%3F

Eventually, you may have a student use a picture that is inappropriate.  When you contact that student, refer him or her to the Student Handbook Mutual Respect Policy at http://at.ccconline.org/students/wiki/Student_Handbook#Student_Handbook_-_Inside_the_Classroom. In such a case, you should also communicate with your Program Lead and Division Chair.

-Karen Kaemmerling

Quality Time: Evaluating Sources

Mary Cash, CCCOnline Librarian, is back this week!  Please feel free to join the library and information literacy conversations in the companion Community threads!

Do you have discussion or other assignments where you ask your students to find web sites that are relevant to what they are learning for a particular unit?  Are you frustrated with the quality of the sources they find? Taking time to teach your students to evaluate sources will not only improve the quality of sources your students use for assignments, but you will also be helping your students develop the important life-long learning skill of becoming a good consumer of information.

I teach ENG 122 – the research paper – and it’s important for my students to learn good research skills.  When I first got my class, there was a discussion on academic integrity, and another on source credibility.  But most of my students weren’t very discerning when it came to choosing sources for their research paper.  They didn’t seem to understand why choosing an article about using the herb St. John’s Wort from a website designed to sell herbs might not be the best source for their argumentative research paper.  Likewise, some students who were against animal testing didn’t think twice about quoting heavily from the PETA website.

I decided my students needed to learn to think more critically about the sources (all of them) they were reading and planning to use in their research papers, so I put on my librarian hat and went to research what other instructors and librarians did to help students learn to be better consumers of information. What I finally opted to do was add in an additional short essay to the unit that has the discussion on sources. The short essay – called the Source Evaluation – requires that students watch a tutorial on evaluating sources (Evaluating Information Interactive Tutorial).  Then students need to go locate a website and an article (preferably from an online article database) related to their topic. The Source Evaluation assignment asks the students to evaluate each source on the basis of the following criteria: Authority, Objectivity, Accuracy and Scope. In their essay, students need to explain why, or why not, each source meets the 4 criteria and to offer explanation and examples to illustrate this, and they need to state if the source will be a good one for their research paper, and again, why or why not.

In addition to adding the Source Evaluation Essay, I revised the source credibility discussion to ask the students to consider what they learned about source credibility from their Source Evaluation assignment.  Over and over, students state that they didn’t realize they couldn’t believe everything they read on the Web. Websites and articles they originally thought of as great sources for their papers turned out to be biased, unsupported, from a questionable authority and don’t meet their research needs. Doing the source evaluation made students realize they shouldn’t take information at face value and that they needed to be looking for higher quality sources.  And this was what I was aiming for. I want my students to leave ENG 122 with better research skills and to be better consumers of the information that constantly bombards them.

If you want to learn more about Evaluating Sources or if you want your students to learn about this, we have quite a bit of information available on the Student Wiki under the CCCOnline Library Resources and the Help with Research section of the Research Writing Toolkit.  Here are the links:

·         Learn about Evaluating Sources from the CCCOnline Library Resources on the Student Wiki

·         Evaluating Sources from the Research and Writing Toolkit on the Student Wiki
-Mary Cash

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

Time Savers for Students and Faculty

Last week, we posted about your welcome e-mail to students.  This week, we’d like to extend that spirit of guidance and encouragement as we list below some of CCCOnline’s time savers for students.  Feel free to communicate this information within your course:
1)      Orientation: Students who would like coaching on how to move around in their courses will benefit from the CCCOnline Orientation.  To participate, students need to self-enroll; they should click “Self-Registration” on their CCCOnline Home Page as shown here.

The Orientation is available the entire semester; it is not a credit course, it is not a required course, and it is free of charge to enrolled students.  Further information about the Orientation is here: http://at.ccconline.org/students/wiki/Orientation

2)      CCCOnline Student Wiki:

http://at.ccconline.org/students/wiki/Main_Page

In addition to providing information about the Orientation and technical support (including D2L tips), the wiki provides students with answers to CCCOnline policies.

3)      Research and Writing Toolkit:

http://at.ccconline.org/students/wiki/Academic_Resources_-_Research_and_Writing_Toolkit

Useful for instructors to recommend and for students to browse, this webliography is a set of quick links for brush-up help on research skills, avoiding plagiarism, and writing in general.

4)      The STAR Center:

The CCCOnline STAR (Student Tutoring and Resources) Center offers assistance to students enrolled in developmental courses.  Those students are automatically enrolled in the STAR Center and may visit the Center to work with a tutor, interact with peers, and get additional practice with their lessons.

One last note on time savers: this Friday (Jan. 28), we are offering an exciting new webinar for faculty:

Effective and Efficient Facilitation Online

• When: Friday, January 28, 2011 (1:00 PM - 2:30 PM - Mountain)
• Who: Lisa Marie Johnson
• What: Participants will be able to identify strategies and resources to employ when teaching multiple online courses to teach more effectively and efficiently. Participants will explore how to save time by using staff supports at CCCOnline and why it is effective to encourage learners to use home college resources and supports, the 24/7 Help Desk, and tutoring services to construct a longer lasting and stronger support system for academic success across all the learners' courses.
• Where: Online via Elluminate. Access up to 15 minutes before the start time from:
  https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?sid=2008363&password=M.BCC4C488D49BCDDD645B92DBAA94D4