This assignment/activity works to pair students in fully online or hybrid courses in order to discuss, via phone or messaging app, any topic of choice. In this example, students in a 100-level composition course discuss their research topic of interest with their partner and offer each other suggestions for refinement. This assignment could be adapted in a variety of ways to support other research assignments or projects.

The following are a series of scaffolded assignments that led to the creation of “Labyrinths of Times,” an online digital project: http://labyrinth.english.lmu.build/. Aspects of it, including the scaffolded approach, are helpful for teaching students how to write for the web.

BEAM Me Up is a one-shot session that works well in addition to a search strategies class, but can be done without. This session asks students to use the BEAM framework coined by Joseph Bizup to organize and synthesize research materials to create a complex and well-supported argument. Rather than evaluated sources using a checklist, the instructor using BEAM asks students to consider how the information will be used (and to consider how authors use information to build arguments). Adaptors may want to replace the sources given here with ones relevant to the students' curriculum.