Jamie Wood Getting students actively engaging with reading in large classes can be challenging and was doubly so during pandemic lockdowns. This new publication from the Active Online Reading project outlines some of the ways that colleagues teaching large first year courses at UCL and the University of Lincoln sought to address these challenges.
Abstract: In large courses it can be particularly challenging to engage students in active reading practices. The shift over the last decade to the use of digital sources and during the pandemic,the adoption of online teaching has further exacerbated the problem. In this paper, wediscuss our strategies for engaging large classes (150-250 students) in active reading throughuse of Talis Elevate, a social annotation tool. We outline two case studies in which we usedsocial annotation and observed a significant increase in student engagement. We proposea new concept, ‘active online reading’, which combines structured individual commentingtasks with responding to other students’ annotations to enhance learning. This concept hasrelevance not only in our reading-rich discipline of History but also across higher educationmore generally
Full reference: J. Chandler, G. Barrett, J. Wood, M. East, Promoting Active Engagement with Text-Based Resources in Large First-Year Modules in History, in A. M. Farrell and A. Logan, eds., Pedagogy for Higher Education Large Classes (PHELC) [Proceedings of the Fourth PHELC Symposium Hybrid Event, 10th June 2022 Dublin City University and Online] (Dublin: Dublin City University, 2022), pp. 40-44.