Returning online students need assistance in reorienting to academic life, the library and information literacy, engaging in scholarly inquiry, and forming a community with their cohorts. Graduate students have unique information and scholarly needs. This discovery session talks about the developing program to serve these students.
This discovery session is intended to highlight a pilot project creating a co-curricular program for graduate students to complete before beginning their online graduate degree. This co-curricular program is designed to equip students with the skills and competencies necessary to succeed in the online environment. The activities students complete range from improving time management to information literacy skills like evaluating information to online readiness for self-regulated learning. The program displays as a series of micro-credentials that students complete in the three weeks before beginning the program. Each activity is expected to take between 30 minutes and one hour, and students will receive a digital badge as evidence of their completion of the activity. This digital badge granularizes the activity and sequences the steps for students; granularization prevents the activity from being amorphous. The activities are kept in a Digital Badge group and displayed in a Canvas Open Course so that students can build a community over the completion of their activities and form a connection with their future classmates. The use of a social network to support the formation of a learning community comes from research on collaborative learning and knowledge building. Through this discovery session, it is hopeful that a useful social media/collaborative tool will be identified to build this community. The building of a community is crucial for online students. One of the critical factors causing students to disengage from their online courses is a feeling of isolation and disconnectedness from their school (McInnerney & Roberts, 2004). Creating a cohort community at the very beginning of a master's program is crucial for graduate students who have different credit requirements and expectations from the university. Graduate students have a major selected before they begin a program and do not take general education requirements that would hinder developing a sense of community. By engaging in a cocurricular, the students can learn essential skills for being successful in their graduate studies while at the same time connecting to their peers.
This discovery session will discuss the progress made so far on this project, challenges that we have encountered, and the impetus behind developing the project. The discovery format was chosen to focus on the development of an unfinished project and network with interested attendees to generate new ideas on how best to engage graduate students as they begin their education online. The learning outcomes for this discovery session are that: (a) attendees will internalize the importance of providing support to returning adult graduate students in an online environment; (b) recognize best practice for designing cocurricular initiatives, and (c) plan/improve similar initiatives in their organization. The presentation for the session will contain 5-7 slides so as to engage people in a quick presentation with plenty of time for discussion. The slides are inspired by the Pecha Kucha style presentation to quickly address the point of the graduate student cocurricular project. As part of the presentation, the assessment of the activities will be addressed in terms of learning theory and scalability. Digital badges contain metadata that inherently builds assessment analysis into the activities. However, models for assessment (peer, automated, personalized) and the types of assessment (formative, summative, self-assessed, mastery-based) are not limited by using a badge. The decisions made on our assessment techniques will be discussed.
When considering the five elements of effective practice this project is innovative as providing support for graduate students to effectively prepare for their online coursework without limiting the cocurricular to a specific program is not commonly done. In addition, this initiative stemming from a library partnership gives students an additional layer of support and expert connection for their education. This project holds potential for replicability as it extends beyond courses and considers skills and competencies essential to any online graduate students. The library plays an important role in student retention (cite, year) and by engaging students before they begin their program and giving them practice with essential scholarly skills it has the potential to serve as a high-impact learning experience. Due to the pilot nature of the program at this phase there is limited evidence and scope of the project. However, the evidence collected will be discussed and the assessment methods to show how the project could be scoped will be addressed,