Most college courses rely on at least one textbook, and online courses are no exception. Professors also rely on a wide variety of scholarly, journalistic, and other reading content either uploaded to or linked in D2L. But getting students to read is a chronic and widespread problem. Here are some ideas for encouraging better student engagement with reading in a course.
A form or worksheet that guides students through readings. Specify three tasks students should complete that accompanying the reading assignments. If you have them ready, you can make them available at the beginning of the semester, to give students a sense of what's expected in the course.
Instructions to students:
List the three to seven “big ideas” you think sum up the week’s textbook reading.
Variations on this might include the "3-2-1" exercise mentioned previously for lectures
Instructions to students:
Textbooks aren’t perfect or entirely comprehensive; no book is. Describe something you read in the textbook that more or less confuses you, or leaves you with a question that the book just doesn’t answer.
This might be done either as a standalone writing assignment, or a discussion prompt.
Instructions to students:
Describe a connection or what seems like a contradiction between two things mentioned in the textbook, that are at least two pages away from one another. You have the entire textbook from which to choose, including chapters we don’t otherwise need to read in class. You can even scan ahead in the book to find things that connect with something we read for this week.
This might be done either as a standalone writing assignment, or a discussion prompt.
Have students write hypothetical quiz questions for the material they read. Provide a rubric or examples of good questions. Consider whether you could put the very best into subsequent quizzes or exams.