This page has material relating to the third session of activities in the Second Life Track of the Learning Through Enquiry Alliance 2008 conference.

One element was a mini-tour of a 3D model of the research process that I (Sheila Webber/ Sheila Yoshikawa) had made for use with the first year class BSc Information Management. The following information was provided to delegates in notecards (notecards are Second Life textual handouts).

-------------------------------

Author: Sheila Yoshikawa (SL)/ Sheila Webber (RL, Senior Lecturer, Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield); June 2008

In this session I will highlight some approaches and issues to do with using IBL approaches with an undergraduate cohort. I will mostly do this by using the work-in-progress model of the research process I have put together.

Although the entire BSc IM programme is not IBL based, it has a strong problem-based focus, and we have been increasing the IBL focus over the past couple of years. We are aiming to increase engagement with the discipline, and to enhance the inquiry skills of the students.

I have reproduced in a separate notecard the extended abstract [ see below] of a session I am delivering at the First Year Experience in Higher Education conference in Hobart, Australia on 1 July 2008, since this summarises a number of the issues. I also recently gave a talk at the ESCALATE conference (on slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/an-inquiry-based-approach-in-a-first-year-undergraduate-class/)

Just to give some bullet points here (some might seem a bit obvious, but still worth mentioning):

- Although we couldn’t say that every student was magically engaged by the IBL approach, there was a noticeable (to us, plus student feedback bears this out) increase in interest and engagement. Students took evident pride in outcomes of their research, they did some excellent work and provided comments (through focus groups and reflective work) to indicate that they had become more aware of the value of the discipline and enjoyed the challenge and novelty of doing “real” research.

- The IBL approach can stimulate a range of students.

- You do need to scaffold the students’ work: we certainly feel that all the sessions which explicitly develop understanding of different processes were needed (writing in different ways, using technologies, developing information literacy, developing specific types of inquiry skill etc.) Progression of skills and iteration seem worthwhile.

- Our IBL focused modules (the 1st year Information Literacy and Inquiry in Information Management; the 3rd year research methods and dissertation modules) are coursework-only assessed. There are other modules which similarly have no exam, and the remainder are 60% coursework, 40% exam. Personally I don’t think IBL can really be compatible with setting unseen exams.

- Working with other faculty who are interested in teaching and want to develop their practice is a definite advantage: certainly one big issue in developing a whole-curriculum IBL approach would be dealing with colleagues who were against changing what they do.

- This is a small cohort (20-25 students each year). It involved a number of staff (e.g. co-teaching, plus all the discussions between sessions). We have been asked about scalability: although a large class would require more staff, it wouldn’t be exponential. However, there would be a problem in finding a suitable, flexible phsyical space for a large cohort (not a trivial issue).