Join Aaron Quigley for an in-depth discussion in this video Refreshing student academic skills, part of Teaching with Lynda.com.
- Whether you teach grammar, mathematics, biology, aerospace engineering, or even instructional design, your students need to have some basic skills to succeed in your class. Now unfortunately, some students will show up without the proper writing, typing, or even study skills they need to be successful. And too often, regardless of our area of expertise, we have to build these skills into our curriculum. Now Lynda.com has courses designed to help students hone these skills, and through minimal effort on your part, we can help students identify the gaps they have in their learning, and provide a resource to help them gain these skills.
Let's take a look at a few of the courses, and where to find them, that may benefit your students. Then let's explore a few ideas for making this content available to your students. At Lynda.com, there's some courses that are very specifically designed for students, and other courses that are really appropriate for students as they move through their academic career. In order to group all this content together, and to make it easier for students to find, under library at the upper left-hand corner, if we go to education e-learning, and then select student tools, we can actually see a list of all of these courses.
Now as I mentioned already, some of these courses are simply from a different segment but are appropriate for students, such as the Monday productivity pointers with Jess Stratton. However, as we scroll down this list, we can see that some of this content is very specifically designed for students, such as college prep writing a strong essay. Or even PSAT test prep, and study skills fundamentals. A few of my favorite courses that I've pulled out of the top are information literacy, study skills fundamentals, time management fundamentals, speed reading fundamentals, and writing research papers.
These are all courses that you can leverage with students to give them some of those academic skills that they need, that you don't want to take the time to teach during your actual course. Now often, in a syllabus, you'll have a section that is prerequisites, or things that students need to know before starting this course. Typically that's a very static environment. You're gonna list out a variety of skills that students need to have. Using Lynda.com, however, you can make this a very dynamic experience for your students. Here in Moodle, the learning management system, I've created a fake course, and here's how I would choose to give prerequisite skills to my students.
I can actually give them as direct links, that go back to Lynda.com courses, where students can actually gain the skills in case they don't have them, or if they need to refresh them throughout your course. You can also use this as an opportunity when you're grading student work. As you're sending it back to your students, maybe they need to have a little bit more help writing research papers. Well, there's a couple options you have here. You could take some time to sit down with the student and work with them one-on-one on how to write a better research paper, or, as you're grading their assignment, you can make a recommendation that they take some time to watch the writing research papers course, and actually learn from a professional on the best tips and tricks for turning in a research paper.
This creates a much better experience for students, because not only have you communicated to your students what those skills are, you've now given them a resource where they can go out and get those skills.
Use the knowledge checks and Lynda.com's built-in note-taking tool to practice what you've learned and remember ideas for your own teaching practice.
- Finding courses in the Lynda.com library
- Refreshing student skills
- Extending learning with a flipped classroom
- Supplementing Lynda.com training with your own videos
- Increasing digital skills
- Mapping curriculum to skills
- Creating learning playlists
- Assessing student learning
- Adding Lynda.com content to Canvas and Moodle