Education Articles from College Matching Service

College is a very enjoyable part of life. This might be the time when you decide on your course of study that is supposed to be your stepping stone into the real world. But this should also be the time when you learn more about yourself and make new friends. It is important that you have friends during your college life, because these friends will be your social support system if you would need anything. To be able to make friends, just follow these simple tips:

BE FRIENDLY

Smile at people around you. Talk to your seatmates in class and other people around the campus. One smile can take you a long way.

JOIN DIFFERENT ORGANIZATIONS

Check the different campus degrees and learn more about the different organizations. Choose at least one organization that would be best for your needs. A good organization is one that would be able to teach you something that would be helpful for your future career path. They should have goals and ideals that fit what you want for your future. Meeting people from these organizations would get you friends that have similar ideas and goals.

JOIN STUDY GROUPS

Join study groups or try to organize a study group. This works well especially for classes that many would have a hard time in. Two heads are better than one. So while you are making friends, you actually get to know more about the subjects that are your waterloo.

ATTEND SCHOOL EVENTS

Be updated on the latest school events and attend those which catch your interest. Chances are you will meet people with similar interests and it would be easier to bond with people this way. It does not matter if you are taking a masters degree or a bachelors degree. Feel free to attend these events to familiarize yourself with your school’s crowd.

For more tips on making friends, you can check out this book at http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671027034/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225728893&sr=8-1

When you make the decision to go to an online college, it’s not always easy to have a space for yourself, especially if you have a family or a small home. It may be that there’s a work area around there, but then your kids or relatives keep bugging you around and such. Here are some guidelines that will assist you on deciding how to design and set-up a home office area just for online learning!

Find some space. If possible, try to dedicate a whole room to your new library or home office. Otherwise, it may be easier just creating a dual-purpose room like a guest room and home office, or setting up a home office area within an unused portion of the house (like the attic or basement). Make sure your room has a door that closes; this will help cut down on noise and interruptions (like the people passing by behind your back). By identifying a specific area or room as your home office, it sends a clear message: “When I am in here, it is because I am studying.”

Pick a quiet location. Road traffic is noisy, so try to pick a room that does not have a window facing a main thoroughfare. The kitchen is also a hotspot for noise: clanging dishes and pans; cupboards swinging shut; the refrigerator door being opened and shut. You may not notice small or repetitive noises now, but when you are reviewing for an exam or drafting a 15-page paper, these little distractions can have a big impact on your concentration.

It’s not always about getting a job, in this economy it is just as important to be able to keep your job. Most people believe that having more education will help you get a job and keep it. We are constantly researching just how much that college degree will help you in the job market. Recently we came across this information from the United States Department of Education which shows that people with a college education have less than one third of the unemployment rate of those without a high school degree. This is fairly compelling and shows the value of a degree in the job market.

Unemployment rates of persons 25 years old and over, by highest level of education: 2006

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Office of Employment and Unemployment Statistics, unpublished 2006 annual average data from the Current Population Survey (CPS).

There is still a lot more research to be done to find out the true value of online colleges.

Photo by: dbking

Congratulations! As you are preparing for your college career, you are creating the foundations for a wonderful journey that will impact the rest of your life.On average, college graduates earn a substantial percentage more in lifetime income than non-graduates, and you will be able to utilize your college education to find a job that is great for you.

However, on the way to obtaining your college degree, there are several hurdles to overcome. The
greatest hurdle for some applicants is securing the financial resources needed to pay for a college education. This guide will provide you with the insight to know where and how to obtain “free money,” in the form of scholarships and grants, which will pay for your education and launch your career.

(more…)

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Electronic resources abound, and they can be of very high quality. The best way to find peer-reviewed, high-quality journal articles is to access them through your online library, or to purchase the articles through an article provider. However, there are excellent sources that are both accurate and of high quality on the Web, and they are often free and not password protected.

Whether you are looking for journal articles, monographs, factual information, or high-quality publicly available resources, the same principles apply. Narrow your topic, make sure your search terms are relevant and focused, make sure your articles and your topic are in alignment, examine your sources for bias and distortion, and finally, make sure that your online class provides sufficient support and background for your argument. Let’s expand the steps and look at them again. It is useful to look at each of the stages individually and to think about how and why you will be engaged in activities.

Create an annotated bibliography. As you download and read your articles, you can keep track of them by creating an “electronic notebook” which would consist of a citation of your sources. Create an entry for each source. Use the appropriate style (MLA, APA, CBE, Chicago, etc.). After you have completed that, be sure to write a one-sentence overview/summary of the article and how it relates to your topic.

Update your outline. Re-examine your thesis. Look at your argumentation structure. Does each paragraph and subsection help support your thesis? How does your research fit? Determine where you have gaps, redundancies, or where your sources take you on a tangent.

Fill in the gaps. Make a list of the places in your paper where you need additional support for your argument. Then, after eliminating redundancies, map where you need to fill gaps, and where your argument needs additional support.

What have others said? As you conduct preliminary research in the library, you will find books and articles on your topic. As you read the material, try to form an idea of what the major issues have been in the discussions about your topic. For example, if your topic is on how stem cells could treat Lou Gehrig’s Disease, you will need to have an idea of who the first people who started researching the topic. You will also need to identify the sides of the argument. Who is for it? Who is against it? Why? What are the issues? Once you have a sense of the main players, you can start to do searches based on author name as well as key words or topics. Ironically, in some cases, you may even have to be aware that the site may not have the original version of the information you’re citing. They may, in actuality, be borrowing from another site. This is particularly the case with Web sites and services that subscribe to Weblogs or where the information is mirrored because they have chosen to pull the entire article in the feed.

Organize your sources, articles, and notes. After you have found your articles, be sure to organize them so that you have a sense of where they will go in your online class paper. Keep your primary thesis in mind, and the points you are trying to make and will support with evidence and research findings from your articles. This is a good time to return to your outline and to start mapping out where you plan to use your sources and citations.

Here are some references that distance learners http://collegematchingservice.com/ can use when doing their online class thesis.

• Weblogs and personal/corporate Web sites. Some are absolutely brilliant. Others are dismal. One can use the information, but it must be approached with care and extreme caution.
• Term paper repositories. Needless to say, we have not mentioned termpapers.com and other places that will sell you a term paper, or will allow you to share term papers with others. These are not the only unreliable sources of information in the Internet. It goes without saying that you should not use these, unless you’re just determined to commit academic misconduct. You could cite them correctly, but they probably aren’t the best source, unless your paper is about the traffic in term papers online.
• Summaries, overviews, and study guides. I, like everyone else, love Pink Monkey. However, I would think twice before actually citing it in a paper. I think that the best way to use Pink Monkey, Cliff Notes, Wikipedia, etc. is as a point of departure. Use them to gain an appreciation of your subject and to orient yourself. However, the information can be very imprecise and inaccurate, particularly in their plot summaries. They leave out details and discussion points that may be precisely the ones that you need.
• Student postings, peer-to-peer downloads of notes, texts, etc. These are excellent if you’re interested in seeing how students write papers, and they can serve either as guides or as cautionary tales.
• Parody Web sites. Believe it or not, some students have actually cited information from parody sites as fact! The Onion.com comes to mind. This is a site that masquerades as a legitimate news site, but is, in fact, pure parody. How can you tell if a site is a parody, or so biased that the information it contains is unusable? Compare the information with others. Does it seem outlandish or extremely biased? Look at least three or four sites.

Evaluate your material. How do you determine if a source of information is of high quality? Even if you are obtaining your data from a library database such as Lexis-Nexis, you should be aware that the articles contained in the newspapers they have in their database could be biased.

If it has advertising or links indicating that the owner is a member of an affiliate program on it, does such activity automatically make the site untrustworthy? In the past, it might have been an automatic disqualifier to see links to advertising, sponsors, or affiliate programs that pay the Website owner a few cents for referrals. However, one can not make such assumptions now. In fact, the presence of affiliate links may indicate that the Website is a labor of love, and that there are no ideological or commercial ties. Further, the lack of commercial ties may actually be a negative factor because it may mean that the enterprise is so profitable, or the ideological motivations are so strong that there are numerous well-endowed backers, or a highly successful business model.

Here are a few considerations as you evaluate your distance learning sources.

• Refereed journals. This is an academic journal that requires all articles to be reviewed by experts in the field. They require revisions and will reject articles if they do not meet standards.
• Books and serial monographs. In this case, it depends on the publisher and whether or not they evaluate, judge, and critique the material to assure that only the most reliable are published.
• Series sponsored by an association or reputable group. These are very common in the humanities, particularly in the hosting of content in the public domain.
• Wikis and collaborations. Variable quality. They can be extremely good and reliable, but the quality, quantity, depth, and breadth will be variable, as will be the scope of the contributions. There can be bias, distortion, or gaps (lacunae) in information.

Define your topic when doing online class research. Narrow it down, but don’t constrain it too much. Develop a solid thesis statement that gives you room to develop an argument. This is a great time to do brainstorming. Clusters, mind maps, concept maps, decision trees, and free-writing are all very effective.
Determine what fields of study your research question will address. Identifying the fields of study will help you determine which journals and subject or field-specific databases to search.

Make a list of items that interest you about the topic. For example, you may be required to write an essay on an aspect of Hamlet in your English class. At first, you feel overwhelmed. Later, however, you think about the characters and situations that most interested you and you recall that Ophelia’s speech and then her subsequent death were interesting to you. You wondered about the psychological state, and how she was perceived by the others in the play. Does her situation illustrate something essential about the human condition? You don’t have any idea, but you’d like to explore it. So, you start by looking into what others have said about Ophelia in Hamlet. You find that her madness and death reflect and reinforce the overall themes of death, madness, murder, and betrayal. How does Ophelia’s madness contrast with Hamlet’s? You start jotting down ideas and key words. These will help you develop search terms and to focus your search by going to the correct types of journals and publications.

Narrow your topic. This requires another round of brainstorming, but this time you will be focusing on what others have written. List terms, ideas, and concepts that occur to you, and then focus on the subcategories that you find most interesting. Then, use the list to narrow your topic. Avoid worn-out subjects and ones that are too narrow or too broad.

The typical online course group project involves the following steps:

·    The instructor assigns you to a group of three or four other students.
·    You are expected to produce a group project together.
·    The project is usually gargantuan, and it requires the creation of a PowerPoint, text, and other presentation materials.
·    After you read the requirements, you e-mail your group members. No one responds.
·    You end up doing all the work yourself.
·    You swear that you will never work in an online group again!

Does that sound familiar? How can you succeed? Below are a few strategies to help you succeed with group work.

Redefine the outcomes as you go, based on the types of work coming. Be flexible and make adjustments as needed. Potential problem: No clearly defined goal or outcome. The overall goal or desired outcome may be imprecisely described or defined. It is important to clearly define the concrete attributes: length, structure, content, purpose, format, complexity. Solution: Make sure that the outcome and goals are as clearly defined as possible. “SMART” goal-setting is ideal: Specific, Measured, Achievable, Reasonable, Time-based. Of course, there are downsides to having rigidly defined outcomes. They can inhibit extremely creative and driven students, and they can result in conformity and mediocrity.

Build in rewards for working with each other. Make sure that each person clearly perceives that there exists a clear reward for the effort expended in the group work. Competitive rather than collaborative. Group members are caught up in proving that they are “right” and that the others are not. They do not want to modify any of their work in order to have it mesh or blend with the others in order to produce a coherent whole. Solution: Separate the tasks and roles so that there is division of labor, rather than overlap.