Why Use Scholar?

Why Use Scholar?

Scholar is a powerful educational tool which can be used in many ways. Scholar meets 3 different sets of educational needs: individual needs and for faculty, class needs and the ability to support a learner centered approach. These are described below along with examples for each. All of these different types of use are connected: find one or more of the below which resonate for you, start using Scholar in these ways and you will be easily able to add other ways from the below list or find new uses for Scholar which spring from your initial use. Start with one and you'll quickly get a feel for Scholar and be easily able to add other uses. You'll quickly discover that everything in Scholar is connected.

Individuals - Faculty, Staff or Students

• Scholar provides you with a free, lifelong account to build and manage your academic and professional resources
• Scholar is easily transferable to another institution or can be easily used on the Scholar site once you no longer have an institutional affiliation
• Scholar is an educational community, of other faculty and students pursuing similar aims and from whom you can easily obtain resources and find expertise
• Scholar provides a Scholar Course page for members of a course to share resources, in addition to a Scholar page for each individual to manage their own resources and copy resources from other users or from the Scholar Course page
• Scholar is easy to use

Individuals Approaches - Faculty, Staff or Students

• Keeping track of resources you've found but haven't had time to read

Challenge:
You're searching on the web for a resource and you come across an interesting reference or an interesting article, but you haven't got time to read it.

Solution:
Once you have a Scholar account and the free Scholar bookmarlet installed on your browser, go to the article and click on the Scholar bookmarklet. This will bring the title and link to the article into Scholar. Simply add the tag toread and save. At a later date, when you have time, go into Scholar and click on the toread tag on your tag cloud and review, then classify it as below or delete the bookmark if the article isn't useful to you.

• Keeping track of resources you've found, vetted and deemed good quality

Challenge:
You remember you had seen an article on your topic last semester, but you can't find it anymore. In fact, you don't have easily to hand many good articles you have previously reviewed.

Solution:
As soon as you've reviewed an article and you find it useful, keep track of it for easy retrieval at a later date. Simply go to the article, click on the Scholar bookmarklet, add some tags which classify the article for you and save.

• Discovering resources that colleagues are using and discovering colleagues with collections of resources on an important topic or your discipline. Lack of time to find good quality resources and difficulty in getting at good resources that others with expertise have found

Challenge:
You're a faculty or staff member with limited time, but always interested in what resourced colleagues might have in your discipline or on a topic important to you.

Solution:
On your My Scholar home page, click on Advanced Search and enter search terms for articles on your topic (keyword) or your discipline and click on Add Criteria and add the criteria User Role. Pick Instructor from the User Role drop down, if you only want resources from other Instructors. Click on Search and see what results you get back. If you are not getting back what you want, try different keywords or try a broader search to catch more articles. Click on Save when you are ready to save this search.  Go to your My Scholar home page and click on Add a Stream to have this search continually running on your home page and collecting resources for you.

• Having your resources available anytime, anywhere, from any computer

Challenge:
You saved an article with as a browser favorite or bookmark on your home computer or you know it's in your browser history on your home computer, but you're not there now and you'd like to quickly get the article.

Solution:
Bookmark good articles as you find them with the Scholar bookmarlet, making them accessible on your account at http://www.scholar.com from any computer, anytime, anywhere. Install the Scholar bookmarklet on all computers you regularly use.

Teacher or Course Centered Approaches - Faculty

• Having a common resource page for your class which can be easily added to

Challenge:
Managing resources for different classes you teach, making them available to your classes and providing a structure to capture resources from others.

Solution:
You can have a Scholar Course Homepage for each course you teach. You control what is on the Course Homepage and only you and your students can access your Course Homepage, from within your course. Try adding one or more of the following streams: a stream based on your discipline, a stream based on the course tag (to show all resources added by class members with that tag) or a stream based on a search of the course tag and your User Name (to show all resources that only you added with the course tag). Streams are a way to build a structure which will catch resources that others add. Streams  allow you to set the criteria for capturing resources from others.

• Organizing and building course-based resources and organizing these resources within courses by topic

Challenge:
You want to organize and build resources within your course by topic.

Solution:
Use the topics you want to organize your resources with, as Tags when you save bookmarks. Use each topic at least once as a Tag in a bookmark, to which you also add the Course Tag for the bookmark. This will ensure your students see all these topics as tags in the Course Tag Cloud. Alternatively, let students know your Scholar username so they can see what tags you use and recommend for organizing bookmarks or copy and paste you're My Tag Cloud into a communication to your students or save 1 bookmark with all your tags as a demonstration bookmark.

• Organizing resources around a classification system used in a discipline and making this structure available to students to guide their uses of resources

Challenge:
You want students to start to think about your discipline with common terms or to make use of discipline based taxonomy.

Solution:
Use the topics you want students to use when saving bookmarks, as Tags in bookmarks you save. This works as the previous item, above. With social bookmarking systems, users do tend to quickly adapt to using the same tags as each other i.e. they tend to naturally self organize towards a taxonomy.  When an instructor explicitly shares common terms or tags this speeds up this process and leads towards the quick adoption of common terms or a taxonomy by students in a class.

Learner-Centered Approaches - Faculty

• Adding a learner centered approach to a course and getting students to interact more deeply with resources

Challenge:
Getting students to interact with resources in a deeper way, to engage with resources critically, to select resources based on criteria your provide or to contribute to class resources.

Solution:
Set students assignments which require them to summarize, critique or justify their selection of resources. Ask students to save these resources in Scholar with thoughtful tags, and have them use the Description field, when adding these resources as bookmarks in Scholar. In the Description field they can write a  summary, provide a justification for selecting the resource or do an evaluation of the resource based on criteria you provide the students. The Description field allows a couple paragraphs of text, up to 2000 characters, to be added.

Think you've found a novel way to use Scholar? Add it to the wiki or let the Blackboard Beyond team know at beyond@blackboard.com