Community of Online Research Assignments

An open access resource for librarians and educators

Information Literacy Assignment Bank

The Information Literacy Assignment Bank is designed to support collaboration between librarians and faculty at College of the Holy Cross by providing a framework and a repository of concrete, but flexible, examples of the ways that information literacy and librarians can be integrated into the academic curriculum. The Assignment Bank project was initiated in Spring 2016 by the Libraries’ Teaching & Learning Team.

Pass the Problem

This group activity can be used in a variety of disciplines and contexts. Pass the Problem aims to have students provide feedback to other students on database and keyword selection. By having students critique each other it works to build critical self-reflection during the research process (it's also pretty fun!).

Curriki

Offers educators more than 80,000 free learning activities for students in grades K-12 in a wide variety of academic subjects.

ACRL IS Information Literacy in the Disciplines

The Information Literacy in the Disciplines site is published by the Instruction Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries. It is designed for instructors and librarians who are interested in incorporating information literacy skills into existing curriculum. Resources included on the site fall into two classes of materials:

1)  standards or guidelines from accrediting agencies and professional associations
2)  supplementary materials such as curricula, articles, and presentations

ABLConnect

ABLConnect is an online database of active learning efforts in post-secondary classrooms. It caters to faculty, graduate student teaching assistants, post-doctoral students and anybody else teaching undergraduate, graduate, or professional students across every discipline.  The site provides activities, lessons, and projects along with downloadable materials in a searchable online format.  It also has video tutorials, interviews with instructors, links to valuable technology resources, and academic research summaries to back up various active learning approaches.

Annotated Bibliography / Introduction to Disciplines

This annotated bibliography assignment has five different versions for five different groups of disciplines: arts, humanities, social analysis (social sciences), life and physical sciences, and quantitative reasoning. Each is meant to give students a way to identify and explore the key types of scholarly sources in those disciplinary categories; for example, to understand what is meant by a primary source in each category.

Teaching Commons

The Teaching Commons brings together high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities. Curated by librarians and their institutions, the Teaching Commons includes open access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, and more.

Interview a Scholar

Students interview their professor(s) and ask them to describe how they do research, how research gets disseminated in their discipline, etc. Each student can ask one question below. This assignment can be useful as a “first day of class” activity for a First Year Seminar. Novice researchers are introduced to scholarly discourse and discipline-specific approaches to producing knowledge by experts.

Scholarly vs. Popular

This assignment is meant to illustrate the differences between scholarly and popular information sources by presenting students with information on the topic of "fracking" from four different resources: a scholarly article, a magazine, a newspaper and a website. It introduces the idea that information can be presented in different formats depending on the context and information need.

Merlot

MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.

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