Why we like this list

This is a wonderful example of how a well designed reading list can effectively get results – for the last month, nearly 2% of the pages viewed in Keele’s Talis Aspire were for this list and, even more fascinating, students spent well over twice as long looking at this list than the site average.

Why? Well, this comes down to the care and attention that has been applied to building this list. Starting with the general course readings, we have a succinct introduction and critically (as there are 20 resources in this section, which is a lot for the most enthusiastic student) this also sets the expectation that these a broad readings to cover an equally broad topic and the student should select from these.

Increasingly, we are seeing lists organised by week or lecture, and this is no different. One benefit of this structure (which may explain the high visits) is that it encourages students to regularly return to their list and changes the consumption pattern to one of small bite-size chunks. We also see consistency in the design – short introduction, 2-4 key readings, 10-15 resources for further reading. The consistency reduces mental friction for the user – each time the list is used, the student knows what to expect (i.e. the same structure as last week!) and the labelling helps further set the academic’s expectation.

Finally, we can see that there is a nice mix of resources – both chapters and articles for specific shorter readings, as well as books.

Final Thoughts

I started this post talking about Google Analytics, and will close it by re-iterating how useful a tool it can be for identifying those lists to which students are engaging. Not only that, it validates that where a list is well structured and annotated, students will actively use it.

Recent years have seen increasing discussion of the ‘social graph’ — the network of personal and professional connections made explicit in sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Against this backdrop there has been growing interest in the notion of an education graph representing connections between learners and other key objects in the education process, such as teachers, courses, learning resources, and so on.

At present, there are few, if any, places where this graph is more apparent than behind the scenes of Talis Aspire, which uses the Linked Data paradigm to make the connections in the graph manifest. We have long believed that systems able to connect individuals into a rich, education-oriented Web will be central to student success in the 21st century, and for this reason Talis Aspire has been built from the outset on a graph-based data model (RDF) that enables this degree of connectivity to be easily expressed and harnessed.

The Linked Learning workshop at WWW2012 (officially the ’2nd International Workshop on Learning and Education with the Web of Data’), focused as it was on Linked Data in an educational setting, provided the perfect forum to begin sharing our ideas in this area. I presented a paper, co-authored with several Talis Education colleagues, titled ‘Assembling and Applying an Education Graph based on Learning Resources in Universities‘ (PDF), that describes how, with the support and encouragement of our customers, we pool data from multiple instances of Talis Aspire Campus Edition in order to provide novel services back to those customers.

The key take-home message here is that while each Talis Aspire Campus Edition customer generates a wealth of data about the courses taught and resources used at that institution, certain insights (such as recommendations or lists of most referenced resources) are only available by looking at the aggregate across a wider sample of the sector. With a significant proportion of UK universities adopting Talis Aspire Campus Edition, the insights provided by this aggregate view can provide real value to those who participate.

As our vision of an education graph develops, we’ll aim to share more of the details with the community at large, through events such as the ‘Linked Learning’ and ‘Linked Data on the Web’ workshops. We’re also participating in community groups such as Linked Universities, which provide a focal point for universities publishing their own information in Linked Data form. With the large search engines increasingly consuming linked, structured data published on the Web by the likes of national governments and the BBC, we hope that all higher education institutions will become first class citizens of the Web of Data by contributing directly to the education graph. Please feel free to get in touch to find out how.

Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee (MIT) (in foreground), Ivan Herman (W3C), Yves Raimond (BBC) and Peter Mika (Yahoo!) debate the uptake of Linked Data at the 5th Linked Data on the Web workshop, co-chaired by Tom Heath of Talis Education Ltd. Image © Inria - Thierry Fournier

Here at Talis, we value our customer voice and our new feature was implemented in response to a customer generated idea. The feature will facilitate the acquisitions review workflows by enabling the library acquisitions team to define custom Acquisition review stages in Aspire e.g. Metadata or Link Checking, Senior Librarian Review, Supplier Comparison, Placing Order.

When a reading-list review is in progress, acquisitions team members can now assign the appropriate acquisition stage to the review as it progresses. This information is accessible to all members of an acquisitions team.

With new filtering capabilities associated with the stages, it is easy to view reviews by the stage of the acquisition process they are in. e.g. an acquisitions team member may wish to view all acquisitions reviews in progress which are are still at the ‘Check existing stock’ stage.

Furthermore, the event changes between review statuses and the review stages are now being captured in the background. This provides us with acquisitions review data which will allow us to generate some powerful reporting via review analytics and dashboards. This will be capable of providing useful information such as, the average time taken to complete a review, average time spent in a given stage, identifying reviews that have been in progress for x days etc. This will help acquisitions teams to identify any problems or bottlenecks in their review workflow and processes and deliver their internal KPIs. 

Upcoming features
In our next release, we will be further enhancing the features around the acquisitions review process by introducing the ability to assign an acquisitions team member as a reviewer. This further supports the workflow so that as the review stages are completed, the reviewer can be changed and the next person in the workflow can be notified that the review has proceeded.

Why we like this list

In this series of posts, we have often discussed list size – is a big list useful to the student, or can it be overwhelming or disorientating? This list provides an exceptional example of how a long list can become an incredibly useful study tool with the use of considered and thoughtful structure.

If you follow the link above, and open the table of contents, you can see the time-based structure (weekly readings) used to good effect, with subsections being used to cluster key and other readings, as well as (on occasion) bring together a sub-topic for particular focus.

The final section in weekly readings is far broader, covering the topic of Studying and Researching Terrorism and draws together a short but interesting mix of articles, chapters and books – this not only aligns well with developing information skills, but the mix in resource types provides students a choice of narrower and broader reading.

We particularly like the second primary section of this list – Case Study Resources, which the student is directed to use for assignments and essays. This is really a reference guide in it’s own right, organised by individual countries and representing a great starting point for learners.

The final section, on terrorism and the media and internet provides further stepping stones for inquisitive students to begin to develop more reflective learning skills.

Closing thoughts

Have you seen a list within your institution of comparable (or greater?) size which also exhibits such wonderful structure. If so, we’d love to hear about it!

What the survey found

John conducted an anonymised survey a few weeks ago to assess student experience of the  Social Work Practice and Research Methods (6 weeks into the 12 week module). 49 of the 60 students responded (response rate of 82%), and two questions focused specifically on reading lists and Talis Aspire.

The first question looked at frequency of use for Talis Aspire. 60% (29 respondees) reported using their list, with most having accessed it up to five times, or about once a week. Of these, 10% had viewed their list over this amount, an encouraging sign of more frequent engagement. The second question looked at the usefulness of Talis Aspire and their reading list, with 87% of users rating as useful or higher in supporting their studies.

What can we learn from this? Primarily, it highlights the importance of engaging students to understand more about their list use – not just at an institution level as we often see, but also at a module level. This can provide specific relevant insights into the behaviour of single cohorts, allowing more detailed conversations to be entered into.

This needn’t be hard work – a couple of open questions during class or tutorials to understand why certain students aren’t engaging (maybe it’s simply a case of being unaware, or not understanding the value of reviewing course resources) as well as gaining an insight into what works – and what doesn’t – with a specific list means the tutor can continue to evolve and enrich the student’s learning expereince.

Closing thoughts

We asked John for his opinion of Talis Aspire so far, and his comments were particularly interesting:

“[Talis Aspire] is a very helpful resource and needs to be rolled out more widely across the University sector, hopefully with colleagues becoming more willing to share resources with each other.  In a sector which is increasingly competitive and divided, it offers the opportunity for collaboration and mutual support, based on shared interests.”

As we at Talis Education begin to consider ways to add more value to Talis Aspire Campus Edition by looking at the wider ecosystem of data (you can view one way here), we’d be interested in hearing from academics from all universities on how they’d like to see us providing more options for academics to collaborate and support one another, as well as their students.

Why we like this list

This list came to my attention when Colin MacLean (from the library) mentioned to me the positive feedback Dr John G Love had received from students via tutorials.

When I first viewed the list, what is immediately apparent is the quality of the introduction. It ticks all the boxes:

1. Introduces the topic
2. Sets expectations, on how the list should be used as well as what is meant by the various importances
3. Encourages broader reading, beyond the confines of the list
4. Encourages engagement, by inviting recommendations for other resources as well as discussion

The list itself is divided into 6 sections, each one bringing its own value. Core reading is short and thus approachable (even having several core readings that are ‘recommended’ core reading, a nice touch) whilst the ‘Other useful resources’ contains more resources, primarily books and are aimed to ‘provide [the student] with further insight into particular areas, including writing literature reviews, processing data and addressing the important issues like ‘ethics’ in research’.

The remaining four sections all offer something different, but support the general theme of encouraging wider reading by the student. Interestingly, there are no books nor articles here – instead we see a range of websites (newspapers, publishers, research councils), journals and a great selection of videos.

I contacted John to hear his thoughts, especially around using Talis Aspire for the first time and how it may impact student learning:

“I have been very impressed with the facility offered through Talis Aspire.  The systematic way in which materials can be presented, the multi-media resources made available (including e-books, web-pages, videos) and the ability to ‘refresh’ resources making bibliographies ‘living documents’ and always up to date, is clearly the way forward….Talis Aspire takes support for learning to the next stage and engages with the current generation of learners in a way in which they are quite at home.  In a word, it’s excellent and should continue to be provided”.

Closing thoughts

John has brought together a useful, well organised set of resources to support his students learning, and is obviously keen to keep this list dynamic - particularly by encouraging students to share their own discoveries. In addition, John is currently surveying his students about his taught module and hopes to get some additional feedback on his list to further refine it to better meet the needs of his students. It will be interesting to hear more of their thoughts in the future, and how this helps shape the development of the list.

Have you met any academics surveying their students about their Talis Aspire list – we’d be interested to hear more!

Why we chose this list

This list ticks many of the usual boxes which we look for, which more importantly are the things that encourage students to engage with a list and get value from it. The topic-based sections are never overwhelming, containing between 3-10 resources, with importance values consistently set to give the student useful guidance.

Looking at the resource types selected, we see an interested mix of directed reading (e.g. to specific articles and reports), to wider reading (e.g. books), to resources for maintaining current awareness (journals and websites). This latter category is particularly  critical when reflecting on occasional academic arguments that a reading list is spoon-feeding. It is very difficult to support this where the resources the student are ‘spoon-fed’ are merely stepping-off points to begin their immersion within a topic or discipline.

If you sort this list by type, you’ll notice about 60% of resources are books. Although there is little annotation to the student from the academic, it’s immediately clear that another factor is at play – nearly all these resources have a Google Books preview which will encourage the student to engage with the resource. We took a quick look at the statistics for this list, and found students visiting Inga’s list stay 2.5 times longer than the site average.

We asked Inga about her experiences with Talis Aspire, and if it provided value for her students. She told us that “I find the Aspire lists so easy for the students to access and it allows us as lecturers to focus them on quality resources.”

When asked to elaborate, she explained “I think [Talis Aspire is] particularly for first and second year students as it gives them much more structure and direction to support their studies”.

Closing thoughts

We will be at LILAC this year, running a workshop with RGU on the use of reading lists in information literacy (Weds 11th April, 10-11am). This concept highlighted by Inga’s list of a mixed resource culture – both in variety of types, but also balance of specificity/generality of resources – will surely be one topic that will crop up.  We’d be really interested to hear other opinions on how reading lists can contribute to the information literacy agenda – why not share your thoughts here?

You can view the full list here.

Why we like this list

This exemplifies our belief that a truly valuable resource list for students is one that provides context, annotation and personality. This list makes full use of section notes, resource study notes and the ‘note object’ to provide a rich (and dare I say thrilling) resource list which draws you into not just the resources but the topic itself.

The stand-out introductory text is probably the best we have seen. It clearly states the expectation on the student on how to use the resource list, and the amount of reading that should be done. Do take the 60secs to just read this end-to-end as it really demonstrates how a few well-thought out paragraphs can maximise the chances for students to get the most benefit from their list.

The theme of annotation continues throughout the list – section notes (mainly used on week headings) provide a concise piece of background reading to the topic, whilst many of the resources themselves have short descriptions covering why the resource was selected or specific areas of focus for the learner.

It is also interesting to see Dr Owens pushing the Talis Aspire functionality in a few places – this is just the sort of thing which we welcome, as it can help shape ideas for the system going forward. For example, in several cases, we see links in the notes to companion reading or related resources – this relates to an existing idea on Aspire Ideas which began life considering linking to other formats and editions, but moved on to discuss the idea of relating broader/narrower/related resources to the main one.

We also like the last sentence in the introduction inviting students to suggest resources – maybe in future this could be something made more easy via the application itself. What do you think?

Closing thoughts

What Dr Owens has shown here is the value of enriching the list and resources with notes, as well as just what it is possible to achieve with Talis Aspire with a little imagination – for example, do academics at your institution actively seek recommendations and discourse on their resource list with students? If so, how do they go about it? We’d love to hear more about this!

Why we like this list

As always, it’s about “doing it right” and this list does just that. The list starts with a extremely useful module description (nice use of the ‘Add Note’ object) and features a thoughtful table of contents. The first three sections are fairly broad background reading, ideal for introducing the topic where format is the main tool to cluster resources  – general recommended texts (books), as well as Journals and Web Sites. Notice that the intention here is to partly support information literacy skills by not recommended specific articles or web pages, but rather about maintaining current awareness by highlighting Journals or entire sites.

We see more use of chapters and articles when we move to the main body of the list, which makes far more sense as these are focussed on week-by-week readings so need to be bite-sized and consumable.

Stepping back slightly, the section descriptions themselves are very good at bringing the students attention to the goals and context for the resources selected. It is also worth noting that the amount of resources selected for each section is never overwhelming varying in length from 4-6 items. From the student perspective, that makes the week’s readings far more realistic.

Closing thoughts

It’s great to see another wonderful list this week, and I’m already wondering what next week will bring. Could it be a list from your institution? If you’d like to suggest one, drop us an email or mention it in the comments below.

Why we like this list

We picked this list for several reasons.

Firstly, it is obvious Christina has put a lot of effort into drawing together nearly 400 resources to support her teaching. Four Hundred! As a student, that could be very intimidating but what we see here is the use of both importances and sections to give excellent guidance – not just on when the student should be reading the course resources she has selected, but how important each one is. within the context of that section.

This also highlights a simple but effective practice of mixing importances within a section (obviously the works only for topic- or time-based sections). This contributes to solving the problem of students  selecting the first 1-2 resources in a section – a practice we have seen in recent analysis Talis Education has conducted as part of the List Analytics beta test we are currently running with academics across the UK. Instead, by making students scan the entire section to find the resources the lecturer has deemed most important, the likelihood of them seeing (and maybe even selecting!) a recommended or optional resource should increase.

The second highlight is the annotation, especially prevalent in the second section on Novels and Films. We’ve included a screenshot below.

We always like to see annotation on any resource, but what Christina has demonstrated especially well here is how just a single sentence (often no more than a dozen words) can really enrich and lift the experience of the student.

Closing thoughts

Have you seen any lists which you are particularly impressed by? We would love to hear more about them – drop us an email, or use the comments area below.