GUIDELINES for Editors

Various professors have used different techniques to get students to participate. Some of these methods have proven quite beneficial:

1. Offer extra credit - Paul Yock and Jan Pietzsch, Stanford, both offer an extra unit in their classes for students who will actively collect links. Each student is asked to submit at least 30 links in various areas (sometimes pre-selected, sometimes not) of the site.

2. Make it a homework assignment - Assign students with collecting links they've found requiring that they hand in a paper with the list of links. This assignment can be graded and be reflected in the final grade. Mark Haidekker at University of Missouri Columbia uses this technique.

3. Have students make websites - If student teams have the resources to do so, have them create websites for their teams and require that one of the pages on their website is a list of links they have found of utility to their project or paper. We can harvest links from these sites if necessary. Paul King at Vanderbilt uses this technique.

4. Use references from reports - When students write a report to complete a class they will often include references at the end of the paper. These references are increasingly web resources and may be extracted and sent in. The central bmesource staff can help in this process, if preferred, by performing the extraction.

5. Put the TA in charge - Tom Andriacchi of Stanford University uses his Teaching Assistant to gather links from student teams who then sends them on to bmesource.

6. Make up for missed classes - Vera Kallmeyer at Stanford University has students that miss one of her classes use that opportunity to contribute to bmesource. The student must research the subject on the missed day and submit 30 links to bmesource that reflect content on that subject.

If you have a way that works for you that's not listed here, please let us know.