Most courses, including those online, rely on at least one textbook and a wide variety of scholarly, journalistic, and other reading content either uploaded to or linked in D2L.  But getting students to read is a tough chore.   Here are some ideas for encouraging better student engagement with reading in a course.

Make it Count!

When students ignore their professor's directions, threats, or pleas that they read course content, it's not always because they are simply forgetful or want more leisure time.  Often students suspect-wrongly or not-that at least part of the assigned reading does not matter for their course grade. So bear in mind the following:

• Do not assign reading, video, or other content that does not support learning goals and objectives. 

• Your assessments may serve your course objectives very well.  But if you have reading or video assignments that aren't essential for completing assessments, students will notice this and might skip reading or watching videos in future.

• Whether you had a choice of textbooks or not, consider what parts of your textbook or its accompanying web content you can dispense with.  For example, tell students to skip chapters that aren't relevant for your learning goals and objectives. 

By keeping your course goals, objectives, content, and assessments aligned, you send the message to students that you value their time.  Mature students will return the favor.  

Publisher Supplemental Content

Textbooks aren't just textbooks anymore.  Most educational publishers usually offer textbooks in paper or electronic-book (ebook) format.  Many textbooks are packaged with supplemental online content that can range from simple extra readings, to sophisticated adaptive learning assessment engines.   Many of these are gimmicks but others, such as good maps, interactive diagrams, short reading quizzes, or primary sources, can be excellent additions to your course.  When considering a textbook, ask the publisher representative a few things:

• Does the e-textbook closely parallels the paper textbook?  That is, can you safely recommend either to your students without creating confusion?  

• Is the online supplementary content at links that require an additional log in?   Can you just add the links into D2L so students can easily find them?  If they don't require students to log in with credentials (different from their canisius creds) that's much less work for you and your students.

• If students must log in at the publisher's website, how easy is it for them to create a login?  The easier the process is, the better.

Big publishers often encourage faculty to adopt whole course packages, including textbooks, supplemental materials, activities, and assessments housed in a web space that practically resembles D2L.  Students access these either at the publisher's website, or through a plugin that ITS or COLI must install in D2L.  

In COLI we urge faculty who are considering these to carefully review a set of caveats and questions before employing these packages.