A Scholar Course Home page provides structure to allow student activities and assignments to be set, activities which require students to engage with resources in greater depth and to engage with resources more critically. This allows an instructor to make Scholar a learner centered too. An easy way to do this is:
- Instructor sets assignments for students to locate resources on the internet and to save them in Scholar, with criteria set by the instructor
- Instructor creates Streams on the Scholar Course Home page to capture above output
Sample criteria for Student Assignments
Within Scholar, when a Bookmark is saved, it can be saved with a Description. The Description field allows several paragraphs to be written, up to 2000 characters. The Description field can be edited and updated by the original provider of the Description. Students could be set assignments which required them to use the Description field to:
- summarize a resource
- justify selection of a resource, based on instructor set criteria
- critically evaluate the resource, based on instructor set criteria or a library scorecard (see http://www.library.georgetown.edu/internet/eval.htm for a sample approach for students in their evaluation of internet resources.)
Follow-up activities from Learner Centered Student Assignments
- review several Descriptions written by students in a follow-up class session, selecting well written and poorly written Descriptions to highlight the differences to students
- have students update Description fields after class discussion. This also improves long term quality of resources on Scholar, for subsequent students who take the course and for all Scholar users
- have students add Tags (not Course tags) to ensure that resources are visible to all Scholar users (using only Course Tags will make the resources viewable to only current course members)
- set assignment which requires students to extend the initial assignment into a paper
A Sample Learner Centered Activity. Goal: Getting students to summarize, evaluate, and contribute to class resources
- Instructor allocates topics. Students locate 5 informative and high quality resources, which cover the topic
- Each resource is saved as a bookmark with appropriate Tags
- For each bookmark, students summarize the resource and explain why it is high quality (Description field)
- Assessment: tags cover resources, summary is comprehensive and clear, quality of justification is sound
- Extension: basis for a student paper
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