Heather+Huey

// Heather Huey // Design Document // Spring 2010 //

Course goals: ** This course will deliver an introduction to the information landscape and using the NJIT library, examine the need to evaluate all information sources, acknowledge the legal and ethical implications of using information, and provide the basic research survival skills needed for an undergraduate college research pap er.
 * Course/Program Title: ** Research Roadmaps 101: Navigating the Information Landscape
 * 

This course is for entering students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. While the focus is freshmen enrolled in Humanities 101, this course will also be open to and adapt for transfer students, entering graduate students, and anyone who needs to clear up confusion and be successful at navigating the information landscape, evaluating resources and using the NJIT Library. This course is required and serves as a pre-requisite. It contains no individual course credit but Humanities 101 instructors count it as 10% of the course grade. Prerequisite knowledge: basic computer skills, familiarity with searching the Web. Co requisite: this course is most effective when the student has a genuine research need for a paper or project.
 * Intended audience: **


 * More on Intended Audience: **  A large majority of these students are ages 18-20, though we do have some adults who begin college after working a few years. About 75% are male and only 25% are female . Most are millennials and display classic characteristics of the millennial generation. They are used to finding information very quickly and instant access. They are not very information literate and tend to trust everything they read. None need instruction on using the computer. Their prior knowledge on the topic varies. Some students have been exposed to research by their high school teachers or librarians. All students need an introduction to college level research and at the very least a familiarity with how to use the University Library Homepage to conduct research.

Their attitudes towards the content tend to be that it is not important or relevant to their coursework outside of their Humanities classes. We have conducted hybrid classes in the past, this class is moving to all online. While they complain about having to attend in class workshops, I find that not all comply with completing the workshops online. I am not sure which they prefer, but since they are millennial mostly, I am sure many are happy with the content being delivered asynchronously. They are going to prefer the information in small pieces, in videos, etc. Their motivation needs to be built. Instructors need to grab their attention in flashy ways, but fully developing the relevance in the instructional content it key. Many students tend to just get through the assignment without retaining the information. It helps that the activities in the workshops may be used to complete assistants for their coursework. As students they are used to having to complete difficult tasks, their confidence is high as they usually feel they know all this stuff. Most students if they commit the time to the program will achieve a high grade in the Research Roadmaps. This gives them satisfaction because it is 10% of their course grade for Humanities. The Research Roadmaps might be demanding but the focus is research and not writing which is a more complex task to master, especially since this university focuses on Sciences, Engineering, and Architecture (those fields tend to attract students with High SAT scores in Math not Verbal.).

Since I have such a large number of students, I believe there is no one learning preference and we might cater to all. This school is a Science and Engineering University so students tend to be less interested in reading and more interested in figuring the information out. Engineers are 50% of the undergraduates and they are definitely physical learners and problem solvers. Most students do not like to read and will not read the text we put on the Moodle Course. The Architecture Students overall tend to have visual learning preferences.

The students are separeted in their Humanities 101 classes, supervised by their course instructor. Most instructors are very cooperative and helpful to the librarians instructors by reminding students of deadlines, reinforcing the materials in lecture, and creating assignments that are dependant on using this information – making it immediately relevant. One issue with relevance is that in the General Undergraduate Requirement, there are few courses with research papers, but efforts are being made to incorporate information literacy skills student outcomes into required courses for each major so these skills will improve beyond this course, making this course essential for success in future coursework at NJIT. The students tend to help each other and not compete for better grades. 

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 * Delivery method: **

Instructor-led asynchronous course delivered via Moodle. Due to the number of students enrolled, this course will rely on self-paced learning and/or a packets teaching faculty can take and place into their own courses.
 * Instructional approach/strategies/methods: **

It is proposed that the students will attend a research workshop or have a consultation with the librarian on their research topics prior to submitting the research paper.

Videos, book chapters, text pages. podcasts?
 * Instructional materials: **

Lesson Content Outline