Unit 2: Discovering appropriate resources and services
In the last unit you had a chance to familiarize yourself with the E-Learning Best Practices as they apply to student services and access to campus resources. Unless your campus has an established page of resources available for you to link to in your course, you will need to spend some time identifying appropriate offices and contact names and email addresses for your students to have on hand. You should create a page in your course that lists these contacts with a brief message about the support they provide.
Once you have identified the campus offices and services you can move on to thinking about how the library resources can enrich your course. Access to materials and services including 24 hour chat reference is just one example of a resource that would be invaluable to your students. Specific information about book lending, (like does the library mail something the student needs to their home, or do they need to pick it up at their local library) is another item that is sometimes neglected to the detriment of online students.
Activity One
For this unit, you will spend some time looking at your college's website and then reflect on what you find as well as what was difficult to find, as well as things you didn't find at all. Take a look at this website also for some inspiration. Oklahoma State Website
Activity Two
Document the support offices and contact information according to the guidelines. Can you think of any other services that would be helpful to your students that were not mentioned here? Perhaps resources unique to your course, such as off campus services or stores to purchase art supplies or paper, etc. Be sure to list these as well.
Self Evaluation of Resources Worksheet Print out the worksheet and focus on items 1 and 2 for this activity. We will complete the rest of the worksheet in Unit 3 where we will focus on library resources. You may want to keep a copy for future course development as well.
Reflection
In this unit we have located specific contact information and resources that our students will need in order to concentrate on learning rather than finding what they need to learn. Any time you design a new activity or develop a new unit, think about what your students might need, but not have in order to do well, and then either provide that information or tell them how to get it.
Unit 1: Best Practices Guidelines for Resources and Services
