There are numerous demands on my time: marking, email, committees, email, lecture prep, email, administrative work, email, readings, email, maintaining web sites, email, office hours, email, teaching classes, etc…and did I mention email?  In addition, it is occasionally brought to my attention that I need to make a bit of time for a personal life – but that’s clearly overrated.

Certainly, time and fear are comingled.  If they’re not in bed together, then they are at least bunk mates.  I am finding that my willingness to make changes to my teaching practices, and my desire to try educational innovations, are being filtered through the lens of time.  How much time will this cost me?  Will my schedule be able to handle the addition of this new endeavour?  At the root, this is a fear to make change – fuelled by the fear that I may not be capable of handling all of the responsibilities should the new endeavour not run smoothly.

I am writing this in hopes that someone else out there will be able to share their ideas for adopting new teaching ideas, and doing so in a way that does not overwhelm one’s schedule.  But I’ll break the ice by sharing two ideas.

One of the courses that I teach is Introductory Psychology, and these can be large classes (up to 700 in a section).  With large first-year classes, it would be considered a sign of insanity to adopt a writing assignment.  Thus, it was right for me.  I offer the students a chance to do some writing for an extra credit assignment.  It is an 8-12 page paper where they are to address a series of questions about two different academic journal articles.  I rather like this assignment because it requires them to use the library’s systems to find the articles, it gets them reading academic journal articles in first-year, and it gets them writing (in a large first-year course).  As this is an optional grade-raising assignment, only a small portion of the class participates (between 10 and 20%), and participation is a mix of ‘those who want to’ and ‘those who need to.’  We also handle the marking for this assignment differently than the way we would approach the marking of an assignment that is a course requirement; we can be a bit less nitpicky.  This approach makes the task of marking less of a burden on our time.

Another course that I teach is a third-year course on Abnormal Psychology.  This class can also be fairly large, up to 300 in a section.  I have been struggling to find some way of adopting an extra assignment for this course.  The course is already a fairly full, we have an essay and three exams that are a combination of multiple-choice and long answer questions.  The solution comes from Flavia (yes Flavia, from you).  In a conversation that we had some time ago, Flavia was talking about different forms of communication and how it was valuable for students to learn a variety of ways of communicating.  She got me thinking about having the students write an abstract for their essay and share this abstract on the discussion board of the course web site.  At the undergraduate level, we rarely give our students the opportunity to practice writing an abstract (a lesson in brevity).  And by sharing their abstracts on the discussion board, students will have the chance to see what their colleagues have been writing about, and hopefully this will stimulate some interesting dialogue.  It would not be an “entirely new” assignment for the students – as they would only need to reprise their work from their essay.  But they would still get the benefit of exposure to a new style of writing.  Again, I am thinking of incorporating this as a grade-raising option, but I expect that the majority of the class will opt in.  The course starts up again in September, and I’ll post an update once things are under way.

Any other ideas for saving time?

 “Information Literacy is about changing an individual’s attitude to their learning so that they are explicitly thinking about how they use, manage, synthesise and create information, in a wise and ethical manner, to the benefit of society, as part of their learning life”(Moira Bent’s 2008 NFT Project Report  “Perceptions of Information literacy in the Transition to Higher Education”).

This definition is by far the best I’ve come across. It clearly delineates the what, how, why of IL. Students are more successful at this pursuit if it is done through a community of practice (faculty, instructor, librarian, TA,…) that engages and supports them along the way. Creating consistency in how the community perceives information literacy is a good starting point for collaboration.