Meet CORA (the Community of Online Research Assignments)

Meet CORA, the Community of Online Research Assignments.  My guess is, she’ll become a welcome new friend

The open access, collaborative portal facilitates the sharing and adapting of research assignments for faculty and librarians.  While the primary audience is undergraduate and graduate educators, CORA offers a wealth of reliable and reproducible projects–instruction, handouts, scaffolds, rubrics and more–adaptable for secondary educators, particularly secondary librarians.

Assignments are searchable by Information Literacy Concepts (with connections to ACRL’s six frames), Discipline, Ability Level, Individual vs. Group project and by keywords.  Users are also invited to tag contributed content.  The Teaching Resources tab leads educators to additional portals rich with curriculum and instructional content. (Leading to even more exciting rabbit holes!)

In addition to their submitted content, contributors may share reflections or lessons learned for the benefit of those who move the instruction forward.  Comments are encouraged.

The goal is to creative a community of practice around the elements of student inquiry, including finding, retrieving, analyzing, using, integrating, organizing information and communicating new knowledge and the hope is that the portal will grow to include both traditional and innovative new practices.

Here’s a sample of resources under the Information Literacy categories:

The CORA prototype was funded by a grant provided by the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC).

Filed under: inquiry, portals, research, student work, technology