The following context scenario is for Allison McCallum (read Allison's full persona), Assistant Professor of Sociology at UM, whose goals are to create an engaging learning experience for her students, find and use the best content and tools available for her teaching and research and feel little need to ask for help while using Sakai.
1. It is early August and Allison is in her office, setting up the syllabus for a new upper-level undergraduate course, LING 376: Sociolinguistics, that she will be teaching in the Fall. She has taught a similar course before, LING 476, and wants to adjust her syllabus from that course for LING 376. When she goes to create a new syllabus in her LING 376 course site, she selects the LING 476 syllabus as a template and begins editing right away.
2. As she reads down her syllabus, she realizes that one of the papers students are required to read early in the course needs to be less technical. She removes the citation from the syllabus and opens the Library Resources widget to embed a new citation in her syllabus. As Allison makes any edits to her syllabus, the system is constantly saving them so she does not lose any work.
3. Allison knows just the article she wants to place into her syllabus because she has used it for another class before. She quickly finds the article she is looking for by searching a few keywords from the article's title. Before adding the article to her syllabus, she notices there is a lot of new feedback on the article she has not seen before.
4. Allison has been away from teaching for most of the summer, focusing instead on catching up with research and finishing a paper that is to be published before school begins. She realizes that students have had a chance to provide feedback on the article after it was used in various classes, not just her own, last semester.
5. She investigates the feedback that includes comments from both students and faculty. The general feedback from students is that the article is dated. One of her senior faculty, Professor Donaldson, concurred that the article was a little dated and recommended instead another, more recent paper on the same topic. Allison was familiar with Professor Donaldson's recommendation, but quickly re-read the abstract and skimmed the article to see if it covered the same topics she was interested in. She decided that this paper was indeed more relevant to her class and added it to her syllabus.
6. Allison spent about 25 more minutes updating her LING 376 syllabus. She ran into a book chapter she had gotten scanned by the library's document delivery service years ago which was no longer available due to copyright restrictions. She could see this copyright warning right next to the citation in her syllabus as well as the option to replace the scanned chapter with the e-book that the library has access to online. Allison wants to adhere to copyright law, so she replaced the chapter with the entire e-book and made a note for students to read just the chapter of interest.
7. To wrap up her syllabus, Allison wanted to add an image at the top of the syllabus. She had no idea where to find the image, but had seen Professor Donaldson use it before and knew it would really complement the course description. Allison searched for the image in the Library Resources widget and found it was there as it had indeed been used by Professor Kumar in his LING 425 course. She learned the image was from the UM Image Services, Art & Art History collection - an available digital image repository she was previously unaware of. When she added the image into her syllabus, the proper source information was brought along with it. Allison decided the syllabus was good for now, closed the document and rushed off to a faculty meeting.
Questions raised in this scenario
- Why and how do instructors and students provide feedback on resources that are included in a syllabus (or other document)?
- What happens when Allison cannot find an article she is looking for in the Library Resources widget?
- What happens when Allison wants to search for an article that she has not used before?
- How does Allison get content into the Library Resources widget?