With students already using the web to engage the course, it makes sense to consider building lessons around engaging with some of the myriad web-based resources.  The following resources will, I hope, offer you some ways to think about adding web-based material to your courses.

  • Merlot (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Learning) – This site is a robust portal for online teaching/learning resources mostly developed by faculty for faculty and students. It is organized into disciplines, and contains a search feature. Some of the materials are text heavy; others are quite interactive, including audio and video, as well as flash interactive animation.
  • Visible Knowledge Project – The Visible Knowledge Project (VKP) was a five-year project involving faculty from more than a dozen schools in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning projects aimed at making knowledge visible and at engaging students in knowledge construction.
    • Bass and Eynon, in the findings section of the VKP blogdistill learning from the project into three major themes, each with important findings relevant for faculty who might engage technology in their teaching. Pedagogies of Adaptive Expertise, Embodied Learning, and Socially Situated Learning.
    • Rina Benmayor, in “Theorizing Through Digital Stories: The Art of ‘Writing Back’ and ‘Writing For’, ” explores the “quantum” moves from narrative to theory when students come to concepts through their experience. Her dimensions and categories for evaluation of digital stories might interest individuals who put writing at the center of their courses.
    • Bernie Cook, in “Producing Audiovisual Knowledge: Documentary Video Production and Student Learning in the American Studies Classroom,” documents the ways that collaborative, primary source documentary video production enables his students to become authentic knowledge makers along the lines of actual historians.
    • Take some time to poke through the library of recent VKP essays. You’ll find some great material in there, including an essay by Stephen that explores ways to balance visual and written texts in a course,  a selection by Olsen entitled “Engaging Students as Researchers through Internate Use,” and an essay by Eynon on eportfolio. Each of these projects points to ways one might use multimedia technologies to engage students in authentic learning activities.
  • Primary Source Documents – Increasingly, one can find excellent, government statistical, legislative, and judicial information on the internet.  These materials can form a powerful response to the charge that the internet is full of very poor, inaccurate information.  Any course in which students will be required to engage with statistics or in research can benefit from a lesson that directs students to specific  web-based resources. The Library of Congress is an awesome resource, in both breadth and depth and in in the quality of materials.
    • American Memory Project. For example, in the Tending the Commons, one finds hundreds of audio interviews, more than 1000 photographs, and some manuscripts on the life, culture, and ecology of West Virginia. Historian, art historians, cultural or social scientists, and others can find ways to use some of these materials in a learning context. A journalism or American Literature faculty member might invite students to engage with The Nineteenth Century in Print digital archive.
    • Thomas is the Congressional materials area of the Library of Congress. On first blush, one imagines that a history class, politics or government class, or possibly a legal issues class might be asked to work with materials in this living, breathing collection. The site links directly to both the House and Senate, making it a portal for the current legislative agenda.  Students in a tax accounting class might be assigned to read the actual language of the “Bonus tax bill, impose 90% tax on TARP bonuses” before Congress and engage in some tax accounting analysis of the various versions.
  • Video
    • Lectures. There are lots of lectures available, and the quality is all over the map. iTunesU is one place.  Indiana University has a surprisingly large number of lectures in econ and business, as well as in other areas (http://www.imds.iu.edu/imds/bb.shtml).  This raises a question: Do you make your own lectures or require students to view someone else’s lecture, building discussion around some key concepts?
    • Youtube (yes, Youtube).  Documentary and Public Health in “AIDS in Native Eyes,” a Youtube audio/photo slideshow that has been used in health education courses. As Burke and Snyder (2008) put it, “With the rapid changes occurring in the field of health, it is particularly important that educators who are teaching health-related content have access to engaging and relevant resources to provide to their learners” (International Electronic Journal of Health Education). Might we want to do the same thing?
    • Youtube. Interview with K. David Harrison, linguist, author of When Languages Die.
    • History Channel. It’s commercial, yes.  But the History Channel has some good material  on it.  How about the Ellis Island pieces?