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EDUCAUSEReading & Digesting Scholarly Research: Tips to Save Time While Increasing

UnderstandingTuesday, February 26, 20161:00PM – 2:00PM Eastern

EDUCAUSEReading & Digesting Scholarly Research

February 26, 2019Page 1

EDUCAUSEReading & Digesting Scholarly Research: Tips to Save Time While Increasing

UnderstandingTuesday, February 26, 2016

>> Welcome, everyone, to today's ELI Webinar: Reading & Digesting scholarly Research, Types to save time while increasing understanding. This is Kathe Pelletier, director of student success community programs, and I'll be your moderator today. EDUCAUSE is pleased to welcome today's speaker Dr. Katie lend her, E campus research director at Oregon State University. Before we begin, let me give a brief orientation on our session's learning environment. The online room is divided into several windows. Our presenter's slide is now showing in the presentation window, the largest portion of the screen. The tall window on the left, which many of you have discovered already, is the chat window, serving as the open chat area for all of us. Feel free to use the chat to submit comments, share resources, or pose questions to our presenters. A brief opportunity for Q&A throughout the session and general Q&A period at the end of the presentation. And we really encourage you to type your questions into the chat throughout the webinar. If you have any audio issues or other technical questions at any time, you can direct a private message to technical help for support. Click the top right corner of the chat window to open the drop-down menu, select "Start chat with," and select "Hosts." You can also click on the link in the lower left-hand corner of the screen for quick technical troubleshooting stepping be. And now, let's turn to today presentation. Reading and digesting scholarly research can be challenging when new journal issues, reports, and intros are released everyday day. Today we will explore tips that will help you find research politic to work, read that research more efficiency, evaluate the quality of research, and decide on the applicant of the research you're reading to your day-to-day work. We encourage you to ask any questions you might have about reading and digesting scholarly research. We're delighted to be joined by Dr. Katie Linder, currently the director of the E campus research unit at Oregon State University where she hosts the Research in Action podcast and helps to make research actionable in the field of online teaching and learning. She serves as associate editor for the Internet journal for academic development and is an associate certified coach through the international coach federation. Katie is an avid writing and researcher with a passion for process and peeking behind the scenes at what it takes to be successful. For the past several years, she has focus on blended course design best practices, institutional supports for accessible online learning, and research literacy for scholarship of teaching and learning practitioners and distance stakeholders. She speaks on writing and publication, create it and productivity, self-promotion, and personal branding and teaching and learning with technology. With that, let's begin.

>> Thank you so much, Kathe. I want to make sure everyone can hear me and give me a wave if



the audio is coming through. I'm love seeing this connection, all the weather-related speaking or the weather-related chat go for on. Awesome. Thanks, everybody. Okay, so I am super excited to talk with you today about reading and digesting scholarly research because there is so much of it, and we have to figure out strategies and techniques for fitting this into our day-to-day work, which is already super busy. So before I get started, I want to give you a little context of where I'm coming from with this. I direct a research unit for Oregon State, and part of that work is we're doing national and local studies online teaching and learning. We host a podcast on research. We created a database on efficacy studies and recently released an edited collection on highlighted practice and online education. All of this means we have to be up on the research and we have to know what is going on. If you're interested in live tweeting, here's some information that you can use. It's my Twitter handle and also the EC research unit Twitter handle for our research unit at Oregon state. I also welcome you to contact me via e-mail if you have any questions and if you want to check out the work we are doing in the research unit, you can go to [email protected]. I see a question of where the podcast is. Replace the backslash "Research" with "Podcast" and you will find "Research in Action." Today we will focus on four things -- finding the scholarly research of most importance to your work, reading the scholarly research efficiently, evaluating the quality of that scholarly research, and then deciding when and how you might want to apply that scholarly research in your work, in your day-to-day work. So the first question I have for you is, what are your current challenges when it comes to reading and digesting research? What are the things that you're really kind of getting hung up on or taking the most time or that you're really struggling with? So go ahead and let us know in the chat. What are some of your current challenges with reading and digesting research? All right, Cindy said information overload. More people have information overload. Okay. Keeping up with subject-specific pedagogical research, time, evaluating it, a lot of it is really lengthy -- yes, Victoria, that's absolutely right. Drowning in theory. Dave, I hear your pain. Let's see -- too much, too many areas to stay current with. Absolutely. Okay, so a lot of stuff about being time-consuming, maybe being a little boring. Can be definitely a little challenging. And how do we filter and know the stuff that's really important? Also sherry said she can't remember the details -- yep, I totally understand that as well. Okay. Okay. I'm starting to see repetition in the chat. So I think we will cover a lot of these things today in today's webinar, and I'm going to give you some kind of tips and ideas of things that you can incorporate into your day-to-day reading practices that will help with some of these things. So where we will start is finding the research and given what you just said in the chat, maybe this isn't the problem. You already have too much. You have that pile that is toppling over and finding it is not the issue, but I feel like several people said filtering, and how do we, you know, find the stuff that we want that's actually going to be the most useful? And we may not need to read all the things in that pile. I want to go through different ideas of the places you ma be able to find this that would narrow your search is a little bit in terms of finding the things that will be the most helpful. So here are some ideas of where you can find research in our field. One of the main places which I'm sure all of you are aware of is journals but also journal digests and publisher catalogs. And sometimes we can do quite a bit of skimming just to see what is out there, what's trendy what are the things we're kind



of starting to see people talking about over and over again. For example, the student success literature -- belonging is becoming a trendy word and are seeing that in the literature. And what you can do with these journals is many of them will give you an e-mail digest every time a new issue comes out, and you can kind of skim through what is going on in the titles of the articles to see if there's anything that might be relevant to your work. The other thing that you can do is request a publisher catalog whether it be an actual print catalog or digital catalog, and as each publisher puts out new books each quarter, you can find the ones with online teaching and learning and skimming the titles, is there anything that may be of interest for you to take a look at? So the automatic e-mail alerts is definitely something that I found to be really useful because I don't think have to think about it. I can just kind of have these things come straight into my inbox, and I can take a couple of minutes to skim through and see if there's anything that I think might be relevant to my current work that I want to take a look at. Now, one of the things that's really interesting about our field is that we have a lot of reports, and this is something that I feel like, you know, every month it seems like there's a new report coming out, and my unit started to track this because we were really trying to keep on top of these reports, and there's probably between at least a dozen reports to about 20, so coming out every year, from different places and these are often connected to our national organizations so if you are already on an e-mail list for QM, EDUCAUSE, WCET, you're going to see these different reports coming out from those organizations. And you won't have to try too hard to get these into your e-mail box because they're going to want to promote them. One of the things I'm going to talk about a little bit later is working with other people and maybe forming a reading group to make sure that you're kind of staying on top of reports, and this is actually something we did within my unit so when these reports come out, my staff reads them together so we can talk about them and see if there's anything kind of interesting there, and that's a good way I think, with any of the research we're doing, is to find a buddy, find a partner that is also interested in this, but these reports can also tend to stack up, and so I want to give you permission to just read the executive summary and take a glance and see in those couple of pages if there's anything that feels really actionable to you about your work. Many of these reports come with some kind of abstract or executive summary that you can use. The next area of where you can find research is one of my favorite series, is a New Directions series, and many of these are familiar with the teaching and learning series, but you may not be aware there are other parts of that series for adult learning, for student services, for institutional research, and there are several kind of subcategories in this New Directions series. One thing that is really great about this particular series is it's focused on synthesis of work, not necessarily original research but a synthesis chapter, quick read, of what is going on in a particular area, and the volumes are very slim. They're usually between 100 and 125 pages, and this is a great place to kind of look, if you're looking for a literature review or just kind of a general overview on a particular topic. These are great little place to look. Really easy, really quick to read. Now, one of my other favorite things to do is to set up google Scholar and google alert that will tell me when new publications have come out in a particular area, and as some of you may know, we manage a database through the E campus Research Unit on efficacy research, comparing online, face-to-face and blended modalities, and I get Google e-mail alerts



with a bunch of different search terms to help me see when we have new literature in the area of online efficacy that we need to add to this database. So rather than going out and kind of scrolling through, you know, all the different databases, I'm getting those things directly into my inbox. Now, are you going to get a bunch of stuff in those Google alerts that are not relevant? Yes. So you will have to do some combing to find things of interest to you. If you're actively writing something right now or trying to learn about a particular topic or issue, setting a Google alert is a great way to do that, and it's very easy to do it. And then you just get those immediately into your inbox as new literature is coming out. Now, I had mentioned that database, and this is one other place that you can look, particularly if you're trying to find literature online learning efficacy that is broken down by discipline, and this is something that we know a lot of people in the field were needing. They needed up-to-date research in this area and so we created it. But there are, of course, other data basis that you can look at as well, and one of my favorites is one that many academic libraries have access to, and it's called ULRICH's days that base, a periodicals database where you search by keyword to find periodicals related to the keywords you want to look for so if you're not sure where to start in terms of journal of interest to you for an area or part of your field, you can always go to Ulrich's database and search there as well. Now, many of us are also on social media, and this is another great place to potentially find research. By following industry thought leaders who might have interesting things they're sharing, and also think about, as you are reading and digesting this research, what is the information you want to share about research in the field that could be interesting? Now, I have put just a few people up here in terms of who you might want to follow. These are various people we follow on twitter and then, of course, the EC research handle is there as well. If you have people you think are thought leaders in the field and are currently following on social, please drop them into the chat. These are people you follow to make sure that you're getting the literature, that you're digesting the research and finding the latest stuff. Of course, we want to make sure that we're following all those folks. So please feel free to share who you are following in the chat, if you have good ideas for that as well. And then, of course, we have our industry conferences, and this is a great place to be exposed to new research for the session and there's often a track you can follow that will cover the fellowship. But many places have citations or literature syntheses that you can go to and get a general sense of what is going on in a particular area. So attending conferences is a great way, I think, to find the research also. All right, one last tip is to check out podcasts. And, of course, we have our own research in action where we are interviewing researchers every week from all over the world, but there's also other amazing podcasts in our field, top cast, the teaching online podcast, frequently discusses industry reports and research. Teaching in higher Ed is a great podcast where she often interviews author in the field of teaching and learning. And then, of course, Leading Lines is another great podcast as well, covering tech issues also so you can find different places to kind of get the research other than reading, and I think that the time-consuming nature of reading that many people mentioned at the beginning of the presentation is a real challenge and so if you can hear the research through things like podcasts, it may be something that would be of interest to you. Now, I do also know that many of these podcasts do produce transcripts as well so if you are hearing-



impaired and you want to access them that way, you can do that also. Okay. So before I move on into thinking about reading efficiently and what are some tips for that, I do want to check and see if there are any questions and also if there are other ideas that people have for how to find research that you think would be great to suggest with the group. So if you have other ideas for find research that have worked for you, go ahead and drop those into the chat. So that we can hear additional ideas. And I want to check in with Kathe to see if we have questions coming in at this point.

>> No questions yet. Great information, though, Katie.

>> Awesome. Okay. So let's keep on keeping on here. And let's look at how we can be reading more efficiently because, as you all pointed out earlier on, we are getting so much of this information via text, and we are trying to get through those piles of articles that are in our offices. I know we all have these or are in our digital file. We keep filing them away. So I want to give you some idea of how to process what you're reading so you can have a little bit more of an efficient way of going about it. So the first thing I think is to know going in to the reading if you have a specific goal. If you have something that you're looking for in particular around a topic, do you have a question that you want to answer? And I wanted to break this down into kind of four major areas we often see in research in our field. And that is efficacy research and the question of, what is effective? That is also broke into specific categories of -- for whom it is effective? And how do we know that it's effective? It's going to have more evidence based to it. And then, of course, what does it mean? What are the larger implications of that particular thing being effective or not? I want to break these down further to give you some examples of literature that might fall into these categories if you were to look in these areas. So first, if you're looking for "What is effective?" You may be looking for literature on a particular platform or a strategy, a pedagogical strategy and whether it's effective for use in the online space. You could be looking at particular tools or technologies or techniques, but you're going to be kind of narrowing your search already by thinking about how -- you know, is this piece that I'm reading telling me whether or not this particular thing is effective? If that's your driving question, you will narrow this. You have a comparison of student performance across different kinds of classes. You have flipped classroom modules and whether they're improving student learning and we also see this in some of our larger reports about, for example, the current state of research online learning and postsecondary education where we're trying to just get a handle on what works. Do we know that learning objectives in an online class are being kind of equally communicated in the same way in a class that's face-to-face? So that first question of "What is she forgetive" is really -- effective is an efficacy question, and many in literature go looking for things like that. The second question that we might be asking is there a particular group of students we're trying to learn more about? And this is where we may look for a certain level of learner. We're looking for information about graduate students versus undergraduate students, for example, or we want to know if something works for students with disabilities. Or we're looking about specific faculty roles or discipline. Maybe we want to know about prior educational



experience or degree of motivation or engagement. A lot of the student satisfaction and faculty satisfaction literature is really getting at this question of who are we talking about and why to we care about that specific population. A couple of examples of this are study we recently did on student uses and perceptions of closed captions and transcripts where we looked deeply at some subcategories of students to try to better understand how students were using and perceiving closed captioning as tied to their learning. And then I included another study here about the work habits of students in traditional and online sections of an introductory physics course where we're looking at student who are in different modalities but in a particular discipline to better understand how they're learning. So a third category is the "How do we know?" These are the kind of articles or research pieces that are really going to focus on assessment, on measurement, on data, on analytics, and a lot of the work we're seeing right now on learning analytics and personalized learning and how we can use data from the learning system to better understand student learning falls into this category. It's really focused on the evidence of learning and how we know it works. So you're also going to see in this category some kind of meta and sees of different kind of methodology and designs of how do we understand what is understanding here. So a couple of examples in this category is when we look at things like item response theory for online homework and also the report from 2010 of evidence-based practices and online learning and the meta-analysis of the interview. How do we know? What are the tools to get at the measurements? And the final category is about, what does all of it mean? So this is a category I think has become more popular in our field as we have more research because now we're starting to get into the "Why" and the bigger picture of our work. And so we're starting to ask questions around evaluation, around cost, around access, retention. How do we innovate? How do we forecast what students need before they know they need it? What are some of the structures and infrastructures that we can build in to make our work sustainable? So this is the kind of thing that we're going to see in our horizon reports where we're starting to look into the future and try to forecast and see what these things really mean. This is also any kind of futuristic work we're seeing in the field around kind of the ultimate meaning behind things like MOOCs or technologies being trendy in the online space. So going into your reading, knowing why you're going into it, not just reading it because it's another report that came into your inbox and you feel like you have to, but what are you really looking for? What when you go through your pile, what are those things that jump out at you because you're genuinely interested in learning more about that topic or know it will help you answer a specific question related to your field or discipline that is going to have a practical use for you? So those are the kinds of things you're going to want to be looking for when you're sifting through the research and trying to decide how to prioritize it. Okay, so once you have your hopefully smaller pile of things that you want to be taking a look at, next you want to think about, how do you evaluate the quality of that work? And this is something that we have. Working on here in the research unit as we look at such a vast variety of things that are coming out of our field and oftentimes in online teaching and learning research, we're getting some interesting disciplinary perspectives of people who may not have ever been trained in education research. They're really coming from their disciplinary methodologies and so we have to kind of think carefully about what are we seeing in the field, how can we



generalize it to other spaces outside of what it was originally intended for, and I saw earlier in the chat someone said "Too many small studies" and a question of how reliable this research. This is the section of the presentation that's really getting into some of those questions. So recently we created a tool here in the Research Unit that I think could be useful for helping you to think about the -- what you're reading in a more systemic way, and we created something called the Report Reader Checklist, a free resource on our website, meant to be a guide for assessing the quality and rigor of online teaching and learning study reports that come out in our field. We really designed it around our industry reports, not necessarily peer-reviewed articles, but I think it could count for both. I think it's something that could be more broadly applied. So what we did with this checklist is divided into categories of a baseline of what you hope to see in something that is reporting on a study so there are categories for context, methodology, your sample, reporting the results, transparency, and the reader experience. And in each of these six section, we have given you specific criteria that you might want to look at. So, for example, in the Context section, does the report describe the larger purpose or need of the study? Does it give the history of the study or theoretical frameworks? Does it include the research aims or goals? And does it offer things like suggestions for further research? And if it does have those things, you would know it's kind of placing the research within an appropriate level of context. For the methodology section you would want to know it actually describes its methodology. You know how the data were collect and how they were analyzed. You know if statistical analysis is part of the methodology, that there are tests that are named and could be replicated, and if coding is there, you know what the coding was done in order to get the information they're reporting out in that particular study result. When you're looking at things like the sample, you know where the data source came from because it's described in detail. You know where participants were recruited and how. You have a sense of if the sample represents an appropriate level of diversity, if it's going to be more generalizable to groups, and if subgroups are included, you can know who they were and how they're defined by the researchers. Then when you're looking at the actual results from that particular study, all the numbers should be pretty easy to comprehend. You should know what the N is, what the overall number is, of who was included in that study, if the report identifies missing data, if it's clear where the studies fit in with the overall purpose, and there were data visualizations. Those should be clear as well and should enhance your understanding. In the transparency section, in a lot of our reports, they are done by vendors or organizations and so you should have a pretty clear idea about who participated in the study, what their roles were, if there were conflicts of interest, and in some you have the raw quantitative data or the instrument or study protocol and make sure any commentary or discussion is rooted in the data results or the study findings that are shared within the report. And the last section was the Reader Experience, whatever you're reading that is using language easy to understand, maybe there's an executive study or abstract to help you digest the finding, the report, if it's digital, meets ADA standards for things like screen readable, and the report is an appropriate length. Many said it's too long. That could be about the report in term of if you can't get through the report and have a hard time. That's a challenge of the reader experience of the report. I ran through that relatively quickly. Thank you thank you so much for posting the link



into the chat. We go into more details in each area and provide example reports that do each criteria really well so if you want to go through and take a look and kind of use this as a way to improve your own research literacy, you're welcome to go and use this tool and think it might be helpful for you. Now, we designed this for people looking for kind of some basic information on research methods and design but thinks it serves us well as report readers and as report writers. So if you are someone contributing back to the field, this would be something else you might want to take a look at as well. All right, so in this last section, I want to think about what does it mean to apply this work to our own day-to-day work. How do we take the scholarship and apply it so that we know that it's being integrated in a way that makes sense and that it's really helping us to make good decisions? A lot of the scholarship in our field is very practical. Its ultimate goal is to help us make change and to help us improve online teaching and learning, program administration. There's all kind of things that it can contribute to. So when you're deciding how you might want to apply this scholarly research in your work, I have a few different suggestions for what you can consider. The first thing is -- and I think we know this, if we have instructional designers in the audience -- to try to do things one thing at a time. That will help us to know if things are wealth making change and it's kind of a scientific way to approach it. Now, we can't always do this, but I think that there are, you know, ideas that we can try to implement them to see if they're actually going to work within our context. So one thing to consider is if you want to do a deep dive in one scholarly area, that will help you to focus in on one thing that maybe you want to learn more about and could be anything. It could be discussion boards. It could be wanting to know more about a certain tool in the field but doing a deep dive in that area can help you to experiment a little bit in that way. The other thing that's really important to consider is if you have any constraints about applying the scholarly research results in your work, and this can also come out of what we know from particular study results or results and maybe the information is not generalizable enough for us to actually think it might work in our context. And this is particularly true for studies that are really focused on a particular discipline, for example, or that are in a small setting and we don't know how they would apply in a large setting so some of the things that help us to know if it's transferable are definitely thing that we would want to consider. You may also have certain kind of constraints on things like funding. Maybe you want to apply virtual reality or augmented reality in your work but don't have the funding to do that -- you know, research and development in that area. So knowing those constraints and how you may able to apply what you're reading to your work is really key. The -- I think for many people, there are couple of different ways they approach, apply new things into their work. One is to start by reading and then implementing and those are the researchers who want to know as many details as they can before they dive into actually applying something in their work. But then I think there are other people who just want to experiment and play. Those are the people who don't always read all of the directions before they get started in a particular area, and they want to know, you know, "Well, I just want to play. I just want to push the buttons and see what will happen." This is another area, too, I think if you want to go in that direction and follow up with the reading later on, you're going to have some experience under your belt that's going to tell you, is this something that was really applicable in my area? Why or why not? And also you may



have some interesting insights to report back out to the field because you have that experience as well. And then the last area of this I think is really important to think about is discussing research with others. And I had mentioned really early on in the presentation a reading group that we put together just around industry reports, and it's with a couple of colleagues outside of our institution and my research team and every time a new report comes out, we meet -- I don't know, maybe once a month for an hour. We read the report We come together and then we discuss it and we look at the structure of the report and apply a version of the checklist and then we talk about its implications for our work and whether that's our individual research projects or actual thing we're trying to implement in our work place or online environments, depending on the roles of the people in the group. So developing some kind of reading group or place where you can discuss this work with other people and even trying to infuse this into the culture of your work environment that reading and staying up with the literature is important to our work, billing time into your calendar so you can devote some time to it. Now, one of the ways we have formalized this is through that group called the collaborative higher education research group. We lovingingly call it CHEdR. We discuss topics resulting to research. For people in the field, who are conducting this research and trying to connect and collaborate and coordinate with other researchers from different institutions, this is an open group. It's just a google discussion group where we have a little bit of a ListServ and meet via Zoom four times a year and do conference meet-ups, depending on who will be at what conference throughout the year. If you want to stay engaged from a practitioner perspective, I definitely recommend taking a look at that as a possibility. Now, the other program I want to mention as well also from a practitioner perspective -- I don't have a slide for it, but it's a recent project that we have been working on that you can find on our website called the Research Seminars Program, and this is a program where we're bringing together researchers from all over the U.S.. Every summer on a different topic, we research and explore that topic together, and we've designed it as a three-year program where people can come together in the first summer to research, come together in the second summer with data they will analyze, and come together in the third summer to talk about how to disseminate to the field in a way that will be practical and useful. So we're going to opening up applications for our second cohort this fall. If that sound interesting to you, you can e-mail me directly for more information or you can check out our website under the "Funding opportunities" to take a look to see if that might be of interest to you. Okay. So I know that was a lot of information and I'm sure there are questions from the group, so I will go ahead and open this up to Q&A and see if there are other things that we can chat about together that would be useful to you. Kath, do we have any questions?

>> It doesn't look like there are apartment questions but would love to ask you a question as folks are gathering their thoughts. I think you gave such a great set of strategies around evaluating research coming into your inbox and really streamlining it and prioritizing, but what about for those of us research pack rats who may save things to read for later and want to organize them, do you have any quick tips for -- how do you know what to keep, and how do you store it in a way you can find it later in a meaningful way?



>> This is such a good question, and I know there are probably suggestions from our audience members as well as different tools and tricks you can use for this so I definitely want to put it back to the audience if you know of ways that you're using and are working well. A couple of things I would suggest -- I'm an inbox zero person and do not use the inbox as to-do list so if I have something that comes in the inbox and marked as "Unread," I try to process as quickly as I can and I would rather file it and then make a note to myself in my calendar, for example, to come back to it later or to actually go and find that thing and print it and, like, have it is in my pile. And I am someone who will take research with me to read like on a plane. I travel quite a bit so I always have a little pile of things I'm trying to get to so if it's something where I'm really just trying to process, you know, like earlier this week I had a report from Titan Partners come in to my e-mail and I immediately print it and set it aside because I knew I would want to read through it and have my team read through it. For the digests, like the mail digests you may get from a journal or something along those line, I typically try to process those in the moment because it really doesn't take very much time. You can take just a couple of minutes to go through, you know, the eight or ten articles coming through and see if it's something that may be of interest to you. The other thing that I did not mention in this presentation but I do several times throughout the year is I will try to set aside a reading day, and sometimes I'm able to do that reading day from home. Sometimes I do it in the office. Sometimes when I'm traveling I try to block out some time for that. But I really try to -- in the same way I would set aside a day for writing or, you know, synthesizing ideas, I want to make sure I'm taking time to read things as well so if I get a pile that's getting a little too high, I know I need to get into my calendar and set aside a day or half a day, even, to work through some of that and start reading it so I do think another technique for this is really just to actually put it into your calendar. And give yourself some time, remind yourself that this is part of what it means to be a professional in our field, is to do this kind of work. Now, I see some people are also mentioning things like Zotero. There's also Mendelay and some other citation collectors that you can use. These are really great because they integrate well with things like Google Scholar and can literally, with a click of a button, put a citation into a list you can go back to later. This is especially helpful if you're generating literature reviews or something along those lines and want to collect a punch of things to go back and read later. And then I see some other folks mentioning things like Evernote, OneNote. I know some people use Pocket to save things to read later. And I see David mentioning plus 1, and Ely, Google Drive, so there's several options if you're a tech person. I tend to be kind of old-school about this myself. So, yes, please keep those suggestions coming, people in the audience, if you have additional things you want to mention how you collect and archive these things in your inbox.

>> Great, thank you, and thanks for all the specific recommendations from the audience. I think you may have answered this question just naturally as you were describing your reading day, but Eli had a question about strategies for daily or weekly schedules to make sure you're working and reading into your busy schedule. Do you have tip for how you accomplish that?



>> So I think that one of the things that can happen with the idea of reading and digesting scholarship is that we kind of put it into a category where it feels really nebulous and this happen with our writing. "Oh, I need to work on Chapter 2," and we're not sure what we're supposed to be doing with that writing. It's the same with reading. We look at the pile and, "Oh, I just need to read more." But we don't necessarily have an idea of what exactly we should be reading or why, and so the thing we will do is put something that you want to read, an actual thing, whether it's a report or an article or chapter of something, and put it on your to-do list for the week and say, "This something that I actually want to read this week, and I have a specific reason for why. I'm trying to answer a particular question or a colleague has recommended this to me and thought I would like it." But rather than just saying, continually to yourself, "I want to do more reading," I would definitely recommend a situation where you are getting more particular and more granular -- about what it is you're reading. This can go back to the archiving and questioning but the idea of how you can look at your pile and pick something off the pile and put it on your to-do list for the week, that's one thing I recommend. I think the reading day is another recommendation I have and definitely tying yourself in with a reading group. Whether that's an article or report reading group can be really helpful.

>> Great. We have a follow-up question about how many articles do you read in a month individually and as a team.

>> Ooh, that's a really good question, Maria. Thank you for asking that. I would say -- that's really hard to generate. Okay. There's three people on my team who are actively reading articles and it kind of depends on our project. Right now we're kind of literature-review heavy because we have four or five projects in our pipeline where we're generating a literature review whether that's for an IRP proposal or actively writing something up so I would say between the three of us -- it would be between 15 and 25 but that's during a heavy literature time. That's not typical. I would also say that we're not reading all of this stuff word-for-word, taking detailed note. We're skimming to see if things are relevant and if we know they are relevant, we're doing a deeper read and note-taking so this is the other thing I get questions on a lot, like, how do we read so much? Well, a lot of it is a skim because we're trying -- we know what we need. We know what we're looking for, and we maintenance through an executive summary or look for ban article abstract and realize that not exactly what it is we're looking for. So we can process a lot but it's not all, like, deep reading as we're working through those articles.

>> I have another question, this is Kathe again. When you do get deeper into a report or an article, do you use any particular active reading techniques that are different than what we all may have learned in school? In term of how you're capturing and connecting the information that you're absorbing?

>> So this is a really good question, Kathe, and there's a tool I stumbled across the other day that



would be easy to replicate if you want to do this. So it's basically a sheet where on one side of the sheet is like a two-columned sheet, if you think about an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. One side has on the cool line just lines so like single lines. The other side of the column is empty and blank. How you would use this sheet is as you're reading through a particular book or article or report is you would note on the lined part if there was a page number or a quote or something of something that was interesting or something to follow up on. They know it's something you want to cite or read later. The empty area of the page is kind of for your free note-taking if you want to be diagram something or kind of doodling as you're reading or doing notes in a nor free-handed way. Some people really like to visualize things if they're reading. Other people want text-based note-taking so that's something I would recommend. As you're going page by page, is there anything you're kind of taking note of you think is interesting? This is also, I think, a really good way to notice patterns in your reading, if there are certain kind of things that tend to jump out to you, or if there's a certain report that comes out every year that you read it but you don't ever really take notes on it like there's nothing in there that seems actionable for you. Maybe you take that off your list and stop reading that every year because it doesn't seem like there's anything you're really taking away from it each time. So it's an active form of reading in that you're note-taking and paying attention as you're going but also serves as a kind of nice record for if you're trying to process information at one time. So that's one thing I would recommend. It's a really, I think, fun way to feel like you're actually being productive with your reading. Sometimes we'll read something, get to the end, and think, "I don't know that I remember anything I just read." This is a good way to make sure you're processing and remembering that information.

>> Great. Thank for those tips. Let me just make sure we don't have additional questions -- looks like a couple of people are typing so I will give just a minute and people are making the connection to the Cornell notes approach, which is a great strategy. Just give one more minute. A question about sharing the notes, like an Excel dump fire.

>> I think that's a great idea. That's definitely something where, because I'm on a research team and there are three of us who are kind of actively working only projects, we do typically share on a pretty regular basis and we'll just kind of wander into each other's offices and said, "Have you read this thing yet? This was really interesting." We especially like sharing and digesting and picking apart data visualization, which may not sound like something fun to all of you, but we did kind of a deep dive in it over the last couple of years so every time something comes out, we want to know how they're scanning data in a visual way and that's something for us to look at and take notes on and we do weekly staff meetings and typically talk to each other in those meet beings about those things. We're not publicly sharing our notes, and I think that's definitely something that you could try to do. I know some people do this kind of note-taking on Twitter as they're reading. They will just jot down notes and things and share out on social media. So that's definitely something that you could potentially share if you want to do it in a more public way.

>> Great. Well, thank you so much, Katie. This has been an information-rich session, and on



behalf of EDUCAUSE, thank you all for joining us today in an engaging session and conversation. Before you sign off today, please do click on the session evaluation link, which you'll find at the bottom left-corner of the screen. Your comments are really important to us, and we take them seriously. And if you're looking for the sessions recording and slides, they will be posted to the website later today and please feel free to share with your colleagues. Finally, please join us for our event, Encore! The 2019 annual meeting is Tuesday, March 5 and Wednesday, March 6, from 12:00 to 5:00 p.m. eastern time. This online Encore event for teaching and learning professionals will be led by presenters from the 2019 meeting who will reprise the most popular and informative sessions. On behalf of EDUCAUSE, this is Kathe Pelletier and thank you so much for joining us today.

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