Get Research Guides

The resources in this guide have been selected primarily to support instructors new to teaching college students. If you’re just getting starting and have no teaching background, these resources will offer some direction and guidance. Whether you’re looking for resources on developing learner-centered teaching, course design, online learning, or authentic learning assessments, NAIT Library staff can help you identify and locate the information you need.

For information about teaching at NAIT, please contact ask_dtad@nait.ca.

The  revised DTAD website will soon be available.

NAIT Library provides access to journal literature through our online databases, direct online and print journal subscriptions, and links to free online journals. We can also facilitate obtaining articles not available through these sources via interlibrary loan. Some examples of journals available through the Library are:  

• National Teaching & Learning Forum (direct online subscription via library catalogue)
• The Journal on Excellence in College Teaching (direct online subscription via library catalogue)

Library staff can help you identify and access journal titles and databases and help you set up search strategies to find relevant articles.

Our Journal Title List, found on the Library website, is a comprehensive listing of journal titles accessible through the Library. You can search it by title to determine how/where to access individual titles. For many journals you will be able to follow links directly to the full text; for others you may be led via the Library Catalogue to the print journal in the Library. Library staff are happy to assist you with this process.

Journal databases

Searching relevant databases allows you to search for articles across many journal titles simultaneously. Databases may include articles from scholarly journals, trade journals, newspapers and magazines. Some databases allow you to stay up to date on a topic or journal title by setting up a current awareness notification. Try the databases listed below first, but depending on your topic, you may want to expand your search to other databases. A full listing of databases available through NAIT Library can be found here.

Academic OneFile
A multi-disciplinary database with extensive coverage of teaching and learning topics. Includes full text of peer-reviewed journals and reference sources.

Academic Search Complete
A multi-disciplinary database with extensive coverage of teaching and learning topics. Includes more than 8.500 full-text periodicals, including more than 7,300 peer-reviewed journals. Also includes indexing and abstracts for more than 12,500 journals and a total of more than 13,000 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.

Education Research Complete
Covers scholarly research and information relating to all areas of education. Includes indexing and abstracts for more than 2,100 journals, full text for more than 1,200 journals, full text for nearly 500 books and full text for numerous education-related conference papers.

Educators eCollection
Covers education and training. Includes full text for approximately 270 journals. A subset of Academic OneFile.

ERIC
Covers education literature and resources. Includes journal articles, books, research syntheses, conference papers, technical reports, policy papers, and other education-related materials.

Contains more than 1,300,000 records and links to more than 317,000 full-text documents dating back to 1966. 

The most effective way to get an up-to-date list of books, ebooks and journals in NAIT Library is to search the catalogue. To ensure that your topic is an important component of the resources you retrieve, remember to search within the subject or the title fields. Below are some subject headings that you may find useful to locate college teaching materials:  

• College teachers
  
• College teaching
  
• Education, Higher
  
• Effective teaching
  
• First year teachers
  
• Learning (Searching for this broad subject heading is an excellent way to get a list of all of the subject headings that have been used in the catalogue that include the word learning. Use it in the search box under the Subject Search tab)  
• Teaching (Searching for this broad subject heading is an excellent way to get a list of all of the subject headings that have been used in the catalogue that include the word teaching. Use it in the search box under the Subject Search tab)  

When you have a particular topic in mind, searching the catalogue for words in the title may be a good choice. You can look for words and phrases that you know are in current use by people writing in the field e.g. first year teachers.

Terms that you find useful in the NAIT Library catalogue may also be useful if you choose to expand your search to the catalogues of other libraries and even when searching for articles in the journal databases.

Browse the Collection

You may prefer to browse the Library shelves for relevant materials and select the ones you want. Or better yet, use the catalogue to browse all of the books and ebooks online by conducting a call search number in the NAIT catalogue. To do this enter your call number in the search box, change the pull down menu from ‘all fields’ to ‘call number’ and click search.

You'll find some relevant books in the following call numbers:

• 378
• 378.125
• 378.197
• 378.2 (teaching and learning in higher education)

TAL Online

If you’re looking for a book that is not in the NAIT collection, you may be able to locate it through The Alberta Library (TAL). To search for a book in TAL Online, use the drop-down menu and restrict your search to All Alberta Post-secondary Libraries or All Alberta Libraries and type in your keywords, author or title. When you identify a book you want from the list of retrieved titles, click the Request button to have NAIT library staff borrow it & bring it into NAIT Library for you.

Alternatively, you can get a TAL card (freely available from NAIT Library’s Lending Services) and go in-person to visit any one of 290 libraries in Alberta and borrow from their collections. 

Interlibrary Loans

If you’re interested in a particular book or journal article but can’t locate it, please use our interlibrary loan service.

Call: 780-471-8780
illo@nait.ca

Interlibrary Loan Request for an Article (PDF) (photocopy)
Interlibrary Loan Request for a Book (PDF)

Note: If there is a resource that you feel would be a useful addition to our library collection, we encourage you to let us know. For more information, please visit our Purchase Request for Library Materials page.

Faculty Focus
A website that provides access to the Teaching Professor Blog. Written by the editor of The Teaching Professor newsletter.

Gallery of Teaching and Learning
Examples of Teaching and Learning work by numerous participants of Carnegie Foundation programs and partners.

TED Talks
TED provides access to talks by a wide variety of thinkers, visionaries and teachers.

Visible Knowledge Project
The Visible Knowledge Project (VKP) brought together more than seventy faculty members from twenty-two institutions between 2000 and 2005. Participating campuses included five research universities, four comprehensive public universities, and three community colleges.

In 2009 the VKP published eighteen case studies along with a synthesis of the findings as an online volume through the Academic Commons. This issue of Academic Commons, in addition to the VKP synthesis of findings, presents seven pieces on the future of learning and new media technologies in Web 2.0 environments.