Reading List of the Week – Exploring the International 1, Aberystwyth University
Our Reading List of the Week is Exploring the International 1, Aberystwyth University from academic Richard Beardsworth.
This list begins with a section for ‘General Reading’, aimed at providing additional context for the students, all of these are marked with ‘Further Reading’ labels, and are a combination of ‘book’ and ‘chapter’ items, to help the students prioritise their reading tasks.
The list is then broken up by sections. The sections consist of sub-sections that either signify lectures or seminars. This way, the academic can help the student to prepare for each week of teaching and the student can easily follow it, ensuring they have read the right material for each session. This also allows them to connect each text with each week of teaching and any notes they may have made, so that they can track back to it.
Marking the specific teaching session can help students and academics when there are multiple teaching formats within a module or course, such as this example, when there are both lectures and seminars running at the same time.
The way this list is labelled allows the student to prioritise their reading tasks. There are up to 6 items per lecture within this list, and this may not always be feasible for a student to complete. Therefore, the academic has provided individual chapters as well as entire books, so that the student is able to dip in when time is short and revisit later should they need to. Importance labels are also added, which are useful when it comes to prioritising reading tasks, the student can quickly identify what is ‘essential’ and perhaps save the ‘further reading’ for another time.
This list was linked to a semester 1 module which ran from October 2015 – January 2016, it was assigned to approximately 170 students. In this time it had 1637 page views and 1438 total clicks onto list items.
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