Creating an interdisciplinary collection of learning objects to address basic skills
Presenters: Jay Holden and Adena Rottenstein, U of Michigan
MELO is the Michigan Education through Learning Objects.
Students come with different backgrounds. Sucess in undergraduate education demands a solid foundation ina variety of basic academic skills, eg. writing skills, working in groups, classroom presentation and study skills. Since they come from a variety of backgrounds we really don’t know which of these skills they have or don’t have and most of the time we don’t have the time for that. How then do we level the playing field?
The solution? Players: MELO
The speakers invited audience participation: break up into groups of 2-3. Introduce yourself and your academic discipline. Come up with 3 basic/foundational academic skills aht are critical for academic success, students commonly lack and apply across various disciplines.
Team Findings: generalizations, written and verbal communication skills, reading, time management [soft skills], ELS.
The process of brainstorming: in the group of 12 [the MELO group] they came up with many skills that students lack in all disciplines. Process II was searching and posting. They searched independently for LOs to address the areas of greatest need. They created a group website for posting search results and composing LO commentary. Finally they submitted LO findings. Process III Selecting: collaborate in selection [review preliminary collection]; which LOs were selected fopr the final collection? 4.25 star rated LOs and above; overlapping LOs found and posted by multiple reviewers.
Outcome: ended up with 17 LOs. Visit personal collection title: the Cross-discipline collection: basic skills. Go to Merlot website and put in the search Merlot @ Michigan and search members, or click this link:
http://www.merlot.org/merlot/members.htm?keywords=merlot+%40michigan