Skip to Main Content

Doing Research: A Student's Guide to Finding and Using the Best Sources

Using the Pressbooks content

Doing Research: A Student's Guide to Finding and Using the Best Sources is available on the KPU Pressbooks platform and is openly licensed with a Creative Commons International 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0). This means you are able to share and adapt any portions of the book, as long as you give appropriate credit to the content creator. See the license for further details.

For instructors, we encourage you to link to all or any portion of the tutorial in whatever ways you think will provide support to your students' research process; you may want to incorporate the modules individually throughout your online or blended course wherever you feel they are relevant, or provide the entire book as a reference or supplementary resource to other course materials.

Videos and assessment activities

Make use of the interactive content:

  • Feel free to embed the KPU Library-produced videos in your own Moodle course sites. Video links for sharing and embed codes are available from the Library's media channel 
  • The tutorial incoporates H5P activities as formative assessment pieces both throughout each module and as a way to summarize the corresponding learning objectives. If you prefer having the assessment activities located within your course, the embed codes and reuse links are available at the bottom of each activity and these can be inserted directly into your own site.
    Note: H5P activities do not integrate with the Moodle grade book so are best considered as formative assessment or self-checks.

Integration with Moodle

The Library has also developed a 4 part quiz in Moodle. Each part corresponds to one of the modules.

  • Pt. 1 Ask the right question
  • Pt. 2 Recognize information sources
  • Pt. 3 Plan a search strategy
  • Pt. 4 Evaluate information sources

Our suggestion is that students first work through the content of a single part of the tutorial in Pressbooks, including the H5P activities, and then complete the corresponding Moodle quiz for a grade or participation mark. The quizzes are reasonably short, auto-graded, and rely mostly on multiple-choice, true/false, and matching types of questions. Most students will be able to work through a quiz in 15 minutes. 

Instructors can "restore" the Moodle quizzes into their own courses using this link: 

https://tinyurl.com/t4pqevt

This link will take you to a Moodle Zip file on OneDrive. From there, you will copy the file and "restore" it in your own Moodle course.

Instructions for how to "restore" a course are here:

https://kputlcommons.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/43000621031-how-to-restore-a-moodle-course

(Be sure to select "MERGE" when restoring to your own course.)

Please note: Instructors can modify the quiz submission behavior, timing, attempts, etc as needed. However, it is NOT recommended that the questions within a quiz be shuffled or randomized, as they build sequentially on a theme.

Upon restoring the quizzes to your course site,  please double check your gradebook setup to ensure they are weighted correctly.  For more information about the gradebook portion of Moodle, visit the Teaching and Learning Commons.

Authentic assessment

For more authentic, open-ended assessment, we encourage instructors to develop their own activities based on the Pressbooks content and incorporate their students' own specific research topics.

For example, after working through Module 1 Getting Started on your own Research, students could submit a one-paragraph response, reflecting on their own attempt to narrow from a broad topic to a searchable research question. 

Contact your liaison librarian for additional exercises and activities that could be adapted for your online courses.