Education Articles from College Matching Service

Is there any benefit of staying at home? People may think that you are idle and don’t want to do any work! That’s why you prefer to stay back at home.

The case is not so. There are two different types of people; the lazy and the lively. If you belong to the former then you won’t work either at college or at home. If you are lively, then you shall always love to do work.

Staying at home becomes a nice experience for the energetic people. If you have the aptitude for doing work and really believe in yourself, then home is just the right place for you. If you stay at home, then juts follow the tips below:

• Creating a routine: Make a routine for your studies. Making a routine would enable you to divide your time and you can concentrate on each and every paper with care and attention. Dividing the time would be beneficial for your exams as well.
• Don’t mingle in daily hassles: Make sure to stay away from the daily hassles at home. If you interfere in the daily hassles, then you will unnecessarily fall into troubles and find yourself in deep waters. If you mingle in various domestic affairs then you cannot concentrate on your studies.
• Save money: While staying at home, you actually save a lot of money which is required for transportation. The money that you save may serve in course of time to come. So, if you are studying an online course, then the most important benefit is your saving money.
• Relaxation: You can actually relax while doing your work at home. Even if you are studying, options for rest is always open for you. Therefore, studying from home (online education, if you prefer so) would enable you to have a more comfortable and substantial time than going to college and wasting energy and time on transportation.

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.

The Ostrich Pandemic.

Across the globe parents go through the same challenging dilemma of making sacrifices to increase the likelihood that their children will have a good education and future career success. The world wide community of parents wants to feel that the influence they instill in their children will be the underpinnings for which their children will use to make good decisions throughout their lives.

Now we have been hit with the “Ostrich Pandmic!” The world wide trend of Parental Units going through life with their heads in the sand!!! Mothers and fathers who overlook the same “rights of passage“, that we all experienced in our youth. It is the tri-fecta of issues that work the same around the world just to varying degrees, drugs, sex and alcohol moving from generation to generation.

Kids have to learn on their own.

Kids have to move through their own social circles and get exposed to peer pressure. It is important that they make the correct choices. No one is immune to the influences of the tri-fecta when moving from adolescence to adulthood. Parents think that their child is special, innocent, balanced and too smart for these distractions. Those who stay up late to finish their school work and dream about the day they will get to pick a college.

The speed of the internet and our technology driven generation has moved us faster than anyone’s expectations. Kids are in constant contact with each other through text, email, IM, facebook, twitter and even the old fashioned cell phone.

Now we get to my studious, athletic and popular 17 year old daughter. My pride, my dilemma. I have shared with her the dangers from my youth and the “rites of passage” that I once went through. The challenges and values that confront us when we have to make the right choices. Trust is key, and a value that I have instilled as key to integrity.

Trust And Integrity.

I had not foreseen the possibility that I would reach a time when I could no longer trust my own child. A seemingly innocent afternoon of baking brownies with her friends… how could it turn into a night mare of “marijuana infused confections.” Followed by a car ride home, under the influence of one of life’s “rites of passage!” Now what am I supposed to do with her? Having given my child my complete trust, and a long leash of freedom in the past. I must now reign her in and evaluate her choices and her future, just when we both thought that time was coming to an end. With my head now held high above the sand, the consequences of my child’s poor decisions must now be addressed.

As a parent we want to believe that plugging all of the possibilities into life’s equation will produce the wisdom we need to guide our children properly. With college rapidly approaching as the next chapter in my child’s journey, like so many other “head in the sand, parental units,” I want to place my offspring in a safe and productive environment.

So how do I decide?

Choosing a venue of higher education for my daughter will no doubt be a life altering experience. But today, the higher education possibilities, teamed with high tech technology offer a “Pandora’s Box” of opportunities that were not afforded to the “Ostrich Pandemic” Generation. Online Education has taken higher education globally. With the economy taking an economic downward turn for so many, the prospect of an online education and a reduced housing and tuition bill has a new appeal to many. Not to mention, the ability to allow today’s youth some additional ‘home time’ to evolve within the fast pace of the high tech world adds additional food for thought.

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.

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.

Most e-learners have mixed feelings about group work and the activities they’ve had to do with their classmates. Perhaps you’ve had the same experience: you loved going to the discussion board and sharing ideas and discussing the course readings. But, when you had to work with the same individuals on an online class group project, it was another issue altogether.

Admit it when there is friction between group members. Get it out in the open. Then, develop a productive solution. Potential problem: The way team friction manifests itself can be subtle. Group members disagree, express frustration, or stop communicating altogether. Some team members are deliberately obstructive, or criticize work, endlessly debate small points, or refuse to contribute at all. Instead of working on the problem, the energy of the group is spent in conflict resolution. Some may drop out. Others find they become passive when they believe that their input does not matter, and they let the dominant team members do the work. Solution: Define the roles as well as the tasks. Provide guidelines for team-member roles, and describe actions to be taken by each member of the group.

Continuously review the tasks and see where you are with the deadlines. Potential problem: Tasks are vague, poorly defined. Although the outcome may be defined and described well, the individual tasks are not clearly defined, nor are they delegated in an effective manner. Tasks are repeated needlessly, or done with contradictory results. Solution: Define and describe the tasks in terms of what needs to be done, how to do it, and how to present the results.

Having a virtual class online is one concept some people find hard to envision. But as an individual distance learner, you must learn how to develop and coordinate with your online college courses.

Simplify the tasks and break them up in to individual steps. Instead of envisioning one large group project, visualize the entire assignment as four or five smaller projects that will each require just two or three steps, rather than dozens.  Potential problem: The project contains too many steps to reach the final outcome. The complexity makes it difficult to understand and to delegate work, and to set achievable goals. Potential problem: Resentment because of lack of work parity. Group members become angry because the work load is not evenly distributed. Some team members may be perceived as slackers or freeloaders, who take credit but refuse to pull their weight. The converse can also be true. There may be resentment because one team member will attempt to dominate and not allow individuals to participate in the process. The dominant person may be perceived as a bully, much to his or her surprise. She thought she was simply being efficient, proactive, and “Type A.” Solution: Listen. List the roles and the responsibilities and behaviors expected of each role. Then, assign tasks to specific team members, and develop a realistic set of due dates. Make sure that there are clear ways to be in touch with each other if there are questions.

Coordinate time. Required collaborations do not reflect the real time commitments of the participants, nor do they reflect schedules or time zone differences. Solution: Give the group at least a week to do each project, no matter how small. Ask the individual team members what they are doing to find out and accommodate each other’s time constraints.

Develop a communications plan. Try to communicate live-time if you can, either with instant messenger, chat, video chat, or with Internet telephony, such as Skype.