Faculty Can't Spare The Class Time?

Abstract
Ever heard the lament from faculty “We would love our students to do better research but we can’t spare the class time?” The objective of this poster session is to share the analysis of the challenges, successes and lessons learned collaborating to develop a multi-media self-paced tutorial for graduate students in a part-time Master’s degree program. By completing the required tutorial on their own time prior to the start of classes, students learned to search academic literature, evaluate various sources of information and use APA citation style to document research. The tutorial was developed using SoftChalk software to provide a higher degree of interactivity in the lessons. The tutorial also included a graded assessment in which students needed to answer correctly at least 80% of the tutorial questions and complete a survey designed to gather feedback. The tutorial, residing in Blackboard, consisted of seven lessons. Incorporating multi-media, most lessons contained embedded videos, screen shots and an interactive task. A self-check quiz was also included. The average time needed to take the tutorial was estimated to be six hours. As part of the analysis we surveyed and followed-up with telephone interviews to try to determine if the learning objectives were achieved, what students learned and more about the user experience –how did students approach the tutorial and what did students think about it? Is a self-paced online tutorial an effective tool for learning/reviewing research skills? If we offer this tool, how can we seek to improve it?
Description
Keywords
Instruction, Self-paced, Distance learning, Virtual, Library, Online learning
Citation