This 6-week challenge will help faculty focus on specific tasks to work on for your fall courses as we prepare for the possibility of different teaching modalities.  Each challenge is based on the TLTC’s simplified OSCQR (OPEN SUNY Course Quality Rubric) checklist. We hope that as you build your course, the checklist is helpful as some of the points are simple and mechanical and some are deeper and get to how a course can be designed and how students are evaluated.

Focus:

OSCQR 5.4 Learners are encouraged to share resources and inject knowledge from diverse sources of information in their course interactions.

Challenge:

Select an activity you will be using this fall and create an opportunity for students to share resources to bring in outside knowledge. Here are some possible suggestions for encouraging learners to become active participants:

• Providing recapitulations and summaries
• Make observations that integrate concepts and discussions
• Citing relevant personal examples
• Asking key questions that lead to revealing discussions
• Engaging in devil’s advocacy
• Disagreeing with the instructor in ways that promote further exploration of the issue

Supporting Materials:

• OSCQR Video Explanation for Supporting Students at Add Knowledge from Diverse Sources (8:20) (https://youtu.be/ymlJG5FwNnc)
• OSCQR – Students Sharing Diverse Resources Suggestions (https://oscqr.suny.edu/standard43/) – Make sure to scroll to the bottom of the page for some great suggestions and examples

Example Materials:

• Three-Before-Me as a Communication Strategy (https://topr.online.ucf.edu/three-before-me/)This concept pushes the responsibility of locating an answer to commonly asked questions to the student.
• In discussion board posts, have students integrate library or other resources into their posts, where they share relevant papers and sources to continue to move the discussion forward.
• Class Glossary Example (2:08) – Ed Beck shows a course that has students create a class glossary about new terms that come up in the course.

Join Us:

• TLTC Summer Webinar series session: Faculty Sharing Resources: Join Your Peers to Get Ideas on How They Set up Content in their Online Class – Tuesday, July 28, 1-2pm, Microsoft Teams
• Teaching Breakfast – Getting Students to Engage in Sharing Diverse Sources of Information – Join us on Thursday, July 30, any time from 8:30-10:00am to talk about how to create and manage online groups.  We will be meeting in the Teaching Breakfast Microsoft Team area

Show us your great ideas!

We have set up a space on the TLTC’s blog for you to share the work that you have done if you are willing.  Leave a comment at the bottom of the Week 6 – Sharing Diverse Sources of Information post describing the work that you have done so that others can get ideas on best ways to organize their courses as well.