Assignment Spotlight: Virtual Journal Club

I have to admit that this isn't actually a full-fledged assignment yet... just one that that I'm thinking about, but I thought I would share it with you all anyway! I've heard of the idea of a virtual journal club in different groups and associations that I'm a part of, but thought this would be a great idea for an online course as well. I was inspired by a strategy shared by another educator who described an online Book Club in her online course. Learn more about this strategy in today's blog post.

I patterned this assignment after the Health Policy Newsfeed assignment I've described previously. In that assignment, students have to provide a summary of a current news article and then give their opinion in it. Students do this every 2 weeks or at least once for each Module in the course. Similarly, in the Journal Club assignment, students would select an article from the latest issue of a curated list of research journals. They would then summarize the article, explain why they selected it, and describe how it contributes to the scholarship and/or practice of nursing.

As this is a new assignment that I have not used with students as yet, I am unsure if I would like to assign groups to the same article and let them discuss it in the way a traditional book club might operate, or have students select their own articles. What are your thoughts?

I'd love to hear your ideas on this assignment. Share them in The Online Educator Facebook Group!

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