A part of the library's mission is to provide resources and support for faculty teaching and educational initiatives. Library staff are available to assist faculty with course development and management as well as assessment.
As you prepare for classes, consider using Open Education Resources (OER).
OER are learning objects that have a copyright license which allows for the resources to be freely used and revised without permission. They can range from full, peer-reviewed textbooks to worksheets and lesson plans. These educational resources can help you by providing tools to use in your class. They can also help your students because they could be used to replace high-cost materials.
Want to learn more? Check out the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition OER Fact Sheet.
Interested in adopting OER for your class? Visit some of these popular OER repositories:
Questions? Contact Faith Rusk at faith.rusk@udc.edu.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a great tool for teaching because it provides scholarly information for students and faculty in a cost-conscious manner.
The DOAJ's mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language. DOAJ will work with editors, publishers and journal owners to help them understand the value of best practice publishing and standards and apply those to their own operations. DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent and maintaining all of its services and metadata as free to use or reuse for everyone.
Visit the DOAJ here.
Blackboard is UDC’s learning management system (LMS). It is available for faculty, students, and staff. For academic purposes, it is primarily used to facilitate instruction, manage courses (traditional, online, and hybrid), administer assessments, collaborate with students or colleagues using Web 2.0 media and applications, facilitate organizations, and manage assignments. It is a rich and powerful tool. To view UDC’s Blackboard policy, click here.
You can learn more about using Blackboard here.
The library is happy to provide information about it's resources and services for any of your Blackboard courses. This can include embedding guides and librarians into the course itself.
The UDC Library can place materials related to your course in a special location with restricted circulation rules. These may be items that the library already owns or may be supplied by you. Instructors are welcome to donate materials to the library after the course ends.
The purpose of reserves is provide access to material required by or needed in classes.
You can read more about reserves and download a reserves form here.
Successful course development and teaching require careful consideration and planning. An important part of this process is selecting material. Material selection informs not only what students will learn but also how faculty can teach. During course development, it is important to consider the following factors when selecting material:
In addition to these core factors of course development, it is important to include the following factors for evaluation:
The mission of the Center for the Advancement of Learning (CAL) is to promote effective and innovative instruction and course design across all colleges and campuses. CAL supports the advancement of evidence-based teaching practices that promote learning and the professional development of all members of UDC’s teaching community.
You can learn more about CAL on their website.
To request a consultation session with CAL, please complete the consultation request form.
CAL also provides a special collection of books focused on teaching and learning. These items are available for circulation to faculty. You can learn more about the collection in this video. A current list of titles is available in the document below.
The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) intersects teaching and research practices and places student learning at the center of its efforts. SoTL researchers identify a line of inquiry, gather/analyze relevant data, and share findings/conclusions with peers—to encourage peer evaluation, revisions of their research, and refined practices for student learning. Collegiality is key to SoTL research, as are deep levels of learner engagement.
CAL uses SoTL research and practice to inform faculty/staff consultations, course design activities, campus-wide professional development workshops on quality classroom practices, and campus-wide engagement in digital learning practices. CAL focuses on traditional, online, and hybrid modalities throughout these efforts.
CAL encourages faculty who are interested in engaging in SoTL practices or in learning from existing SoTL research to explore the scholarship of teaching and learning guide.
