Building your reading lists

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A well-curated reading list can greatly enhance the learning experience for students, providing them with the opportunity to engage with a variety of perspectives and deepen their understanding of the course topic.

Guidance for selecting course literature

  1. Start with constructive alignment (Biggs & Tang, 2011).
    Align:
    1. What do I want my students to have achieved, to have learnt by the end of my course? (define course learning outcomes)
    2. How will students demonstrate that they have achieved the course learning outcomes? How will I evaluate their knowledge, skills? (design course assessment tasks)
    3. What learning activities, learning resources, academic sources, industry sources will I get the students to engage with in order to prepare them for the assessments and therefore achieve the course learning outcomes? (select activities, resources, sources).
  1. Use your knowledge of characteristics of Gen Z – Used to reading online, used to reading shorter texts, used to audio, video, visuals, not keen on reading long complex texts.
  2. Majority of GIHE students are not native English speakers – some may face challenges with level of English.
  3. Majority of GIHE students are industry focused, not preparing for a career in academia or research. Most are engaged by practical examples, case studies, problem solving etc. and need to be supported towards taking the more conceptual or theoretical approaches appropriate for MSc level. So a judicious mix of industry and academic sources is good.
  4. As you start selecting your course literature, use a system to evaluate the literature for quality see https://researchguides.ben.edu/source-evaluation and https://libguides.lmu.edu/aboutRADAR for 2 common systems – which you can also encourage students to use as they select sources on which to base their research.
  5. Make sure each source is only one or two clicks away from course Moodle page– make access for students as easy as possible.
  6. Build a scaffold around the link for each source, which explains to the students:
    1. These are the pages or sections or chapters you should read, the minutes of the video you should watch (identify, specify)
    2. This is what you should do with the source – summarize, identify examples, compare and contrast 3 approaches, find weaknesses in argument etc. etc. (activity)
    3. This is how long you should expect to spend on this activity (time on task)
    4. This is why you should carry out this activity, this is how this activity will prepare you for the assessments, how it will help you achieve the course learning outcomes (answer question “what’s in it for me?”)
  7. Seek feedback from students about how engaging, useful, etc. they find each of your sources and make any necessary adjustments.

Explore the physical collection available on the Bulle campus