Impressions Scholarcast

Educause Quarterly (EQ) vol 30 no 1 2007 is proving a valuable resource. The article by Alan Roper identifies 7 tips from successful online students. I summarise:

1. Develop a time-management strategy: not a new tip but just as crucial for online learning.
2. Make the most of online discussions: a skill I have pushed strongly in both my SharePoint days and with iLearn. For three semesters I have allocated marks for online discussion participation.
3. Use it or lose it: apply knowledge immediately for a practical purpose as soon as you acquire it during the course.
4. Make questions useful to your learning: more important online than ever, and online discussions make the process less frightening than asking questions in class.
5. Stay motivated: an old faithful that is easy to promulgate but difficult to achieve.
6. Communicate the instruction techniques that work: boils down to instructors being active continually in the online discussions.
7. Make connections with fellow students: another old chestnut that can be achieved more successfully, and less embarrassingly, online.

I will probably use this list in general advice to my classes in future.

A recent article by Lorenzo et al in the latest Educause Quarterly (vol 30 no 1 2007) provides a summary of the results of a study into ”college students’ perceptions of libraries and information resources”:

• 72 percent of college students ranked search engines as their first choice for finding information;
• 2 percent use library Web sites as the starting point for an information search;
• 67 percent learn about electronic information resources from friends (when excluding search engines);
• 53 percent believe information from search engines is as trustworthy as library information;
• 36 percent use librarians to cross-reference information for validation; and
• 80 percent use other Web sites with similar information as a validation tool, slightly more than those who use instructors for validation (78 percent).

Our librarians have been investigating this for some time. I can see why they are worried and starting to take positive steps in training students to gauge the quality of information discovered via search engines.