Best practices in teaching
TiinaH: Just to start with something 
I've taken up some issues which could be discussed:
- How to motivate participants? They do have motivation when they enroll to optional courses, at least some. How to make the subjects more inspiring? What methods could be used?
- Could pre-course questions/exercises be useful - could they make participants orientated to the subjects?
- The atmosphere? How to handle when you've an unspiring participant who torpedos or is giving not-so-useful- comments?
Labels:
None
5 Comments
comments.show.hide-
-
Permalink
-
-
Permalink
-
-
Permalink
-
-
Permalink
-
-
Permalink
Add Comment2009-02-11
Päivi Helminen
In Viikki Science Library, we have found precourse questions and exercises very useful. We use a this kind of form
https://elomake.helsinki.fi/lomakkeet/13587/lomake.html
Sometimes I also advice students to read through a self-learning material and ask them if they learned something new. This ensures that they have thought the upcoming issues a little before hand.
2009-03-22
Ruth Stubbings
Motivating students who are attending IL lectures / workshops that are embedded into modules is close to my heart. Students often think they know how to search for information and therefore some are quite negative during the IL sessions. As you have implied this can have a detrimental effect on either the class or the lecturers view of how the session went. I try an ice breaker exercise where students can visually see how much each other know on the topic, but this does not always work.
I like the look of the questionnaire Viikki Science Library have been using. I think questionnaires are a good way for helping students to ascertain their own level of knowledge, as well as helping librarians pitch their sessions correctly - how many particpants have filled them in and returned them before the course? Hope you don't mind, but I would liek to share your work with a colleague.
We have tried confidence check lists - see http://learn.lboro.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=12264 as an example.
2009-05-10
Päivi Helminen
I am glad to hear that you shared our precourse questionnaire with your colleagues.
My experience is that students are motivated to learn IL skills but the timing is crucial. It takes a lot of time and effort to embed IL issues but without appropriate timing and embedding IL issues to the curricula our teaching is less useful.
Päivi
2009-09-12
Ruth Stubbings
Hi Päivi,
I have just realised that our VLE does not allow visitors access to some of the activities. So I will try and remember to put the confidence checklists in a Word document and upload them. A couple of years ago we created a set of questiosn to check students knowlegde. These are available from http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/development-fund/fund_details.php?id=65
The CILIP CSG Information Literacy group have just agreed to fund a scoping study that will look into the development of a IL questionbank available to all. I shall keep you up to date with how that progresses.
Ruth
2009-09-12
Päivi Helminen
Thank you, Ruth.
Your questionbank sounds interesting. I checked the link that you gave and downloaded the questionbank but my PC refused to open the XML files.
When and how do you use the questions? The topics sounded similar ones that we in our ICT Driving Licence for the first year students.
Actually, a couple years ago we collected an IL questionbank in Finland but I have to admit that I have not used it. Most likely because I do not like false/true and multiple choice questions and I wish there were other feasible means to test that students have learned the essential skills. However, when we have thousands of new students multiple choice tests are an easy and useful option.
Päivi