BY SYLVIA KOHL
The United States is one of the most attractive studying locations in the world and have the largest international student population – at any given time, more than a million students from abroad are enrolled in America including Stanford higher education programs (about 5 percent of the nation’s total student population). So, if you want to join them, the road is already well-trodden before you. However, there are still some aspects of studying in the USA that you should be well aware of before you even start entertaining such a possibility.
ESTA stands for Electronic System for Travel Authorization that determines whether this or that person is admissible to travel to the United States under the Visa Waiver Program. In practice, it means that whatever your goal for entering the USA and whatever other documents you have, you must obtain ESTA application authorization before you go. Fortunately, in the recent years, getting it (at least for those living in eligible countries) wasn’t very complicated – you can apply for it online. What’s even better, it allows multiple entries in the US, which means that if you study there, you will be able to go back for summer break and return without getting any additional approvals.
It may be tricky, especially if you come from a country where students don’t get much freedom in defining their curriculum. So do your research before settling on anything in particular. Make sure different classes you choose don’t interfere with each other and that you will be able to deal with all of them realistically. The best course of action would be to consult your advisor to find out which classes will be the best to complete your major. However, it doesn’t mean that you should take a purely utilitarian approach – if you like a class and think you will be able to complete it, why not?
And again, do your research. International students often end up in unpopular locations simply because they aren’t very well aware of what the campus has to offer, don’t know what to look for and agree to anything offered to them. Even if you already got into a location you don’t like; it isn’t set in stone – in most cases, you can ask to be transferred.
It is also a good idea to stick to campus accommodations at least for the first few semesters. You don’t know anybody yet and have no car to get around quickly. If you end up in an off-campus apartment, it will make meeting new people and be participating in campus life all the more difficult.
Even if you don’t need extra money all that much, do it for at least one semester. As an F-1 visa holder, you aren’t allowed to work off-campus which would be a natural decision for any other student, but on-campus jobs (tutor, library assistant, etc.) are all yours. The most important thing about it is that you will be able to get a social security card that will make things like getting a driver’s license, credit card, opening a bank account and so on much, much easier.
Students in the United States can save lots and lots of money through various discounts their status entitles them to, so make sure you learn all about them.
Being a student in the United States is a fun and rich experience, so make sure you deal with all the technicalities as soon as possible so that they don’t distract you later on.
Sylvia Kohl is an IT teacher with more than 8 years of professional experience. Her main spheres of interest are e-education and she convinced that learning process doesn’t stop after years in school and university.
Many individuals live in the idea that once they leave the four corners of their school with their college diploma on hand, there’s no longer need to invest on continued learning. This is not true. Life- long learning is vital and there are scientific facts to prove it.
What you have learned in college is no longer suffice to essentially prove what you can actually do but what you are willing or able to learn. Also, ongoing demographic changes have put momentum into this development and demand for skilled individuals is ultimately high to be complied or met by ordinary college graduates alone. Nowadays, most companies are reliant on innovative and extensive academic knowledge brewed by tones of college homework more than before. This knowledge can be acquired through providing continued education to individuals.
An important education concept was explained by Professor Sylvia Heuchemer. She explained that we are now faced with technological and scientific progress with an increasingly rapid cycle of innovation. This therefor requires individuals to keep their expertise, skills and knowledge up to date.
Knowing this, it is just fair to say that learning should be a continued process and even you completed your college degree, need to learn more in order to master your skills, get a high paying job and more.
If you take time to look on most successful individuals, even these people still have passion for continuous learning and are committed to deepening their knowledge and understanding the world constantly. If you wanted to make lifelong learning a natural habit, there are ways to help you.
You do not really need to execute lots of ways to make learning a natural habit because just these 3 ways can help you do so:
Having this overall love and passion for learning is actually wonderful however, if you wanted to channel this love and passion, you must develop some particular thoughts about the things that you wanted to focus on. If you do not have goals, you will surely end up with shallow understanding of many different important subjects. By determining personal passion and the desired outcomes, one can really chart learning path for themselves. It is highly essential to realize that your focus can significantly change over time. Lifelong learning is a natural habit that you must cultivate for it gives shape to directions of your learning.
Another step to make lifelong learning a natural habit is making an effort to carve out energy and time for everyday learning. This means that you need to make learning a part of your schedule as much as possible. Time block does not really need to be that huge; even 15-20 minutes of reading or writing can be great. You then need to decide what you need to do, when to do it and where you are going to do it. Put that particular period on calendar then stick to it. Remember that most successful individuals in the world make lifelong learning a great priority.
Putting effort to learn is not enough, you should not stop learning instead. Continue the passion and the drive to learn. You need to accept and then enjoy that learning and believe that learning never ends. There are always things that you wanted to learn more and there are those skills and experiences that you wanted to improve. When learners accept the fact that their learning journey is not yet over completely, they become more motivated to push through and continue learning and gaining knowledge every day.
There are many good reasons to never stop learning. As you are actively seeking to learn new things, you become happier. Several studies revealed that the more ambitious individuals have become especially in the goals they set, they become happier. And as they decide on their own goals, their happiness does not become reliant on others.
If one continues to learn, he or she becomes irreplaceable. If you are fine with the knowledge you accumulate during your college years, then you’re limited by your contributions. If you learn more, you will be able to build, create, develop and more making you irreplaceable.
These are actually just a few of the many ways to make lifelong learning a habit. If you take time to search, you will discover more ways to help you become the better version of who you are.
These steps are what you need to take in order to make lifelong learning a natural habit. By incorporating these steps in your life, you can certainly establish this good habit that can benefit you in many ways for a lifetime.
About the author:
Amanda Wilson is a creative writing assistant at Columbia College of Chicago. Her favorite thing in this process is an open conclusion, thanks to which people can build own practical theories. According to Amanda’s world view, this makes any writing purposeful. Feel free to contact her at G+.
Entry-Level Visual Design Tips for Students
Irrespectively of what you major in, what college you attend and what courses you take, the ability and skill to use numerous visual tools available to students today can end up doing you a great service. Of course, knowing how to work with them is a must for students of visual arts, but even if you study something that doesn’t directly deal with drawing, photography or something else along these lines, knowing your way around the most important design tools can make dealing with certain tasks much easier.
Let’s say you have to prepare a PowerPoint presentation or handouts you are going to spread in the audience during a conference. Even when you’ve mastered the technical aspects of the relevant software tools, if you don’t have at least basic knowledge of visual design you won’t make a good job of it.
So, here are a few things knowing which can make your job on your design projects much easier.
Humans are predominantly visually oriented creatures – which means that they perceive a lot of information solely by evaluating the colors, even before they decipher the image or start reading what is written. For example, warm colors such as red, yellow or orange are associated with warmth, passion or happiness, while cool colors transfer the meaning of trust, solidity and professionalism (that is why so many law firms and governmental institutions choose them when building their websites). Other colors also have concepts associated with them, so when you choose a color gamut for your project make sure it goes along with its contents.
Using a thematically appropriate font can greatly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of any document or project that uses them – professional designers go as far as saying that selecting a font is akin to choosing an outfit to wear. It may not change the core of your work, but people are going to unwillingly make assumptions about it based on their first impression of fonts you use. Different occasions require different fonts – the analogy can be taken a long way. What it all boils down to, you should approach the choice of font carefully. There are many top-notch free fonts that aren’t in any way inferior to the ones available commercially.
Although there are plenty of professional design tools like Photoshop and Sketch, if you deal with visual design only from time to time and don’t intend to dedicate your entire life to a career in this field, you can easily do with free software. There are many examples of publicly available tools that have more than enough functionality to do the jobs at a level you need them in college.
Students trying to make their projects look a little bit more impressive with the help of visual design are often dumbfounded by all the options and possibilities that open up in front of them, ending up using everything that even remotely fits. The result is all too often a jumbled mess of colors, effects, figures, pictures and whatnot that don’t carry any unifying idea and do nothing but confuse the viewer. So study from expert designers and keep things as simple as possible – in the long run, good taste and professionalism show themselves not in the skill to use all the options but in the ability to refuse using most of them and settling only on those that are completely right for this particular case.
Again, all too often newbie designers try hard to fill every inch of space with something. It is, however, often much more powerful to do the exact opposite, offsetting the few important elements you do have.
Even if you are not a design student, knowing a few tricks can be helpful now and then – to help you complete your project without extra help, to make it stand out from the crowd, to give your work that little bit of special quality.
David Gutierrez has worked in the field of web design since 2005. Right now he started learning Java in order to get second occupation. His professional interests defined major topics of his articles. David writes about new web design software, recently discovered professional tricks and also monitors the latest updates of the web development.
BY SYDNEY WHITMAN
A good narrative essay example will benefit you a lot. Though you can get professional assistance from homework helping websites, there is no harm in gaining more knowledge. Narrative essays are not only about summing things up for readers. You have to innovatively present your personal experience and allow readers to come up with their conclusions after evaluating the paper. In this post, we will examine creative ways to find good narrative essay examples with ease. Read on!
Whether you are in college or high school, you can get good narrative examples samples from your school. The activities going on in your school, teachers, and students can present you with tons of inspiration. Evaluate what you like and dislike about them; feelings you get from colleagues or friends in your class.
One place to find good narrative essay examples, is on websites of prominent schools; universities in particular. Most of these top-tier universities upload samples and stories of real writers to help promote their work on regular basis. So you can take advantage of that.
If you are not close to your teachers, you better have a change of mind. Your teachers have read far, so they know what writing a good narrative essay entails. Teachers are always interested to help and guide students who are willing to learn. And making an effort to seek help gives them the impression that you are a hardworking student that wants to succeed.
If you cannot lay hands on good narrative essay samples, ask your teacher to guide you. Even if he or she cannot write a sample to guide you, their instructions will.
You can get help on narrative essay writing from a fellow student. It could be a student from your class or someone ahead of you. You can even read their work to understand how to write yours. Ask for explanations if you find anything you do not understand.
Books can inspire you to draft a perfect narrative essay. Interestingly, most of these books have tons of inspiring stories and instructions on narrative essay writing. Concentrate more on books written by famous authors, not just any random book you find on the internet or school library. Learn how they picked their choice of words, grammar and writing style. Note that your essay must engage your readers or graders to earn good marks. So take note of this while reading through various samples to understand the flow of the paper.
Every home is unique, and interestingly, yours can serve as an inspiration for your essay. Find out the strengths and weaknesses, achievements and failures in your home. It could be about your siblings or close relatives.
Your neighborhood can also fetch you some good examples. Assess the traits of people living there; if the neighborhood is safe or not. Do you want things to change or like the way they are? Just take the time to analyze things and you will find a couple of inspiring stories to work with.
New channels whether online or newspaper can provide you with great examples. Watch the primetime news, for example, and you will discover different dramas and stories about things happening around the world. These stories can be about an individual or a group of people. But can help you write an engaging essay.
Find and read different newspapers to get stories, passage or an article that can provide the kind of insight you need. You can even decide to extract a piece you find interesting to serve as an inspiration to you.
A lot of drama happens around different states in your country that can serve as a good example for your essay. Some you may find in newspapers or online new channels or visit the scene yourself to get firsthand information if you are close. Stories of how your government is tackling corruption, insecurity, and economic policies can serve as an inspiring story for your essay too.
Conclusion
If you are finding it hard to draft a narrative essay, you can rely on samples for inspiration and knowledge. There are many ways to get samples for your paper; you can ask for professional help, conduct online research or draw inspiration from personal experiences. We have highlighted some of the ways to get good samples for your paper. So read and take action to draft quality essay that will captivate the grader and attract good marks.
Byline
Sydney Whitman is an academic coach and combines her daily job with content writing for a range of educational websites. She believes that educated youth is the only way to achieve peace and welfare in out world. Connect with her on Twitter or G+.
By Phyllis Baker
University can be an overwhelming experience. Students choose markedly different ways to cope with stress. While some go in for sports, others smoke. What makes them choose the latter option? And how does it affect studying?
It’s interesting that smokers try to find at least one excuse for their habit. To objectively evaluate such lifestyle, we’ll weight all the pros and cons.
Pro: Relieving stress?
Students’ schedules are busy: lots of assignments, extracurricular activities, part-time job, and a private life. High pressure makes them look for the ways to relax. A traditional cigarette or an electronic cigar becomes a pill against stress.
Con: No!
Numerous studies prove the contrary. British researchers from Oxford University and King’s College London found out that smoking doesn’t reduce stress. Quitting does! They claim that smoking causes anxiety and say that smokers “deserve to know this”.
Pro: Easier communication.
Freshmen often start smoking just to make friends in a new place. It can be a tool for socializing – just ask a fellow smoker for a cigarette or the brand of their e cig vaporizer (visit vapingdaily.com for more info). The conversation has already begun!
Con: Going outside for a smoke break.
Smoking in the dorm is forbidden. And nicotine cravings force you to leave a comfy room and go outdoors in any weather, be it a heavy rain or frost.
Con: Smoking bans across the universities.
More and more universities and colleges go tobacco-free. The reason for this tendency is creating a healthier and more accessible environment for employees, students, and visitors. Now, each nicotine addicted student has to go off campus every time they need a five-minute break, no matter how far it is.
Pro: A possibility to avoid a boring or unpleasant conversation.
A smoker can interrupt a conversation any time by saying: “Excuse me, please. I need to go and smoke a cigarette.” It’s a sure way to leave a bothersome chatterbox alone if they don’t smoke.
Con: You diminish a chance of getting into relationships.
What would you do if you meet the man or woman of your dreams but he or she is against cigarette smoking? You would kick smoking immediately, wouldn’t you? Well, it’s easier said than done. Breaking any habit is challenging.
Pro: Controlling weight.
Some students keep using tobacco for purposes of weight control and weight loss. On average, smokers weigh seven pounds less than non-smokers. Smoking kills appetite and decreases the sense of taste and smell. But for the side effects like cancer, it would be a good weight-control strategy.
Con: An enormous health burden.
Tobacco use increases your risk of developing coronary heart disease, osteoporosis, and high blood pressure. 16 types of cancer can be caused by this habit. In fact, smoking harms nearly every organ of the body.
Con: Damaging your budget.
You need money to cover accommodation, food, transport, study materials, etc. Count the monthly expenses on cigarettes. Don’t you think it’s time to improve your money management skills?
Con: Worse memory
The researchers from Northumbria University in England performed a simple but interesting experiment to test “real world” memory abilities. The volunteers were 69 participants of a university campus tour. 27 of them were current smokers, 18 were ex-smokers, and 24 never smoked.
People received a list of 15 campus locations to visit and actions to make at each of them. For example, they were supposed to find the library and check their phones for new messages there or visit the sports center in order to ask about the cost of membership. The results are as follows:
Con: Lower GPA.
According to the study released by the University of Minnesota, college students who use tobacco are less likely to show high academic performance.
Those who said they had smoked within the past month had an average GPA of 3.12 compared with a 3.28 GPA for those who reported not smoking. Surprisingly, even students who smoked a few cigarettes in a month had lower GPAs than those who didn’t smoke at all.
For a university student, there are still more cons than pros to smoking during studying. Dropping the useless habit will have more benefits than improving your health and academic performance. Here they are:
There’re different ways to quit smoking:
You might have heard that e-cigs are a healthier alternative to smoking and seen unique e cigs on the net. Vapors all over the world report that they managed to reduce the number of tobacco cigarettes they smoke.
As a college student, you should think twice before lighting a cigarette. The habit puts smokers in a disadvantaged position. To improve your wellbeing, academic results, social relationships, and other aspects of your life, consider giving up smoking.
It doesn’t matter what method you use. Just keep in mind the benefits you will reap when you succeed.
About the Author: Phyllis Baker is the journalist and blogger. Currently, she manages public relations for the quitting smoking community.
By: Susan Parker
Many students go through college with minimal or no participation in extra curricular activities, with the excuse being that they would rather focus on academics. Being serious with your studies is certainly laudable, but to exclude extracurricular activities is also to deprive yourself of all the benefits that come along with them.
Although different activities have specific features and attendant benefits, they will generally enable you to meet with a diverse group of people with whom you have shared interests. The bonds that you form in those activities will often be some of the strongest you’ll form throughout your life and the network will be very important when you become a professional. Here are four different activities to consider, and what you can expect from them:
Whether it’s soccer, basketball or rugby you’re interested in or something less hectic like tennis or cycling, you’ll certainly find a club for it on campus. By taking up these activities, you’ll stay in shape and might even get to play professionally if you’re skilled enough. You’ll usually have to try out in order to be admitted and then turn up for weekly practice sessions.
If your major is in health and physical sciences, athletics or exercise science, you’ll benefit even more because of the practical experience you’ll be gaining at matches, events and conferences you participate in.
Public speaking is one of the most important skills for professionals across virtually every field today, and debating is one of the best ways to immerse yourself and develop your strength in that area exponentially. You’ll need to brush up on your research skills and learn to think very quickly on your feet as well, which will also be very important outside school.
If you represent your college and do well at national and international tournaments, you’ll even become something of a celebrity within the circuit and may get invited (and paid) to give talks and train other colleges.
“When you apply for scholarships, fellowships or jobs that prioritize leadership ability (which is a lot of them, nowadays), there’s no better way to prove that you fit the bill than by showing them your track record of participating in student government while at college,” said Dan Fox, CEO of Boss Laser.
Apart from showing that you are responsible and someone that other people look up to, your experience at project management, bookkeeping and any other skill you picked up will definitely count favorably for you.
Spending time in an endeavor to help other people without the expectation of a reward can be very fulfilling. You’ll be helping to make the lives of other people better and that will certainly be a point in your favor with anyone who goes through your Resume or LinkedIn profile.
When you consider that there’s an outlet for whatever skills or interests you have in the volunteering sphere, from taking care of animals, coaching children, helping people with aids to sleep better or fixing things around the neighborhood, you’ll see that there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t spend some time volunteering.
Of all the different activities available for you in college, the four above offer a great combination of opportunity to acquire essential skills as well as being attractive for your resume when it’s time to get a job. Physical health, leadership experience and top-notch presentation skills are essential elements of succeeding in virtually every career nowadays, and when you add the goodwill that’ll come from being active as a volunteer, you’ll be all set for career success as soon as you graduate. Plus, while you’re in school, your experience will be enriched thoroughly through the people you’ll become friends with and all the activities you’ll share with them.
Susan Parker is a writer and tech geek. She volunteers for local environmental conservation programs and writes stories online about things that inspire her.
BY ANTON LUCANUS
It’s a question commonly asked by 20-something-year-old graduates: fresh out of college, knee-debt in debt, six months into the job hunt and already finding that without a Masters or PHD the chance of scoring a high paying job is fairly low, contrary to common belief.
Was the investment in tertiary education worth it?
Was it worth the time and effort invested in the application process? Was it worth the countless hours spent toiling over an argumentative essay for a subject never to be spoken of again? Was it worth the $30 grand in debt?
A mere 38 percent of college graduates think that yes, getting a higher education was worth the cost, according to 30,000 American graduates interviewed by Gallup-Purdue Index. And the numbers of students enrolling in tertiary institutions across the country are now beginning to reflect this uncertainty, after a boom in enrolments through the late 1900s which saw enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions increase 23 percent between 1995 and 2005. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, enrollment has been declining since 2010–11. Enrollment peaked in 2010 at just over 21 million students but by the fall of 2014 there were 812,069 fewer students opting into getting a tertiary education.
Is it because students are becoming increasingly disillusioned by out-of-college employments prospects and the uncertain economic times we are living in?
The sheer magnitude of debt accrued by students today and the cost of gaining a tertiary education often deter people from pursuing higher education. Some prefer to simply enter into the workforce as unskilled laborers, baristas or low-level clerks straight out of school, enabling them to begin earning right away and avoiding the unnecessary burden of student debt.
In the United States, the average wage of workers with a bachelor’s degree has declined by a whopping 10 percent in the first part of this century, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Having a bachelor’s degree no longer guarantees an easy ride to the top of a professional firm, rather, it simply puts you a step above the less educated workers whose options are limited to clerical jobs, manual labor and hospitality roles. Since when was it required to speak several languages, hold multiple PHDs and have contacts in the industry in order to get a decent job? Many graduates are finding that their tertiary education provides very little value to them once they are out in the working world, forcing them to question whether it was all worth it.
Roughly one in three college graduates (34 percent) today work in jobs that do not require a degree, meaning that much of the college-educated workforce are not using their skills in the workplace, and the unemployment rate for recent college graduates has remained stuck around 9 percent for some time now. To add to this, fifteen years ago, 55 percent of underemployed college graduates earned more than $45,000 per year, but that figure has dropped to just 43 percent today. For even more recent college graduates, that figure fell from 47 percent to 34 percent. The outlook for new graduates is grim, to say the least.
But studies have consistently shown that investment in human capital pays off, every time. Economists have carefully studied labor market “returns” on education for close to fifty years now, and the findings have been remarkably consistent: typically graduates earn more than comparable non-graduates to equate to roughly a ten percent annual return on their initial investment in tertiary education. This is almost on par with the return on physical capital investments, and lowers the cost to society by lessening the dependency costs of graduate students.
We see the benefits of a tertiary education more than ever during an economic recession. During poor economic periods unemployment rates in general are usually terrible, but for those lacking higher education the situation is considerably worse. Take the most recent economic recession in the United States, for example. The average national unemployment rate was over nine percent, but for those with a bachelor’s degree that number dropped to around four percent. Having a degree provides people with a security blanket; leverage with which to play off against other, lesser qualified candidates. Education is also the only real way of breaking the cycle of generational poverty. In a family where all but one has no education beyond high school, it is likely that the person with a tertiary education will fare better in their lifetime than the others, professionally-speaking. Admittedly, it takes nothing but “gift of the gab” and confidence to network, establish relationships and develop entrepreneurial talent – but in order to be able to take advantage of expanding markets and burgeoning opportunities in the business world, one generally needs to have a tertiary level understanding of economics, business and marketing.
Let’s face it. Getting a degree won’t protect millennials from unemployment. One must consistently develop and nurture new skills in order to remain competitive and stay ahead of the pack. But a bachelor’s degree will certainly enable graduates to fare better than their less educated counterparts during times of economic sluggishness – that is for absolute certain.
Byline – Anton Lucanus is the Director of Neliti. During his college years, he maintained a perfect GPA, was published in a top cancer journal, and received many of his country’s most prestigious undergraduate scholarships. Anton writes for The College Puzzle as a means to share the lessons learnt throughout his degree and to guide current students to achieve personal and educational fulfilment during college life.
BY ANNABEL MONAGHAN
The vast majority of Americans – 95 percent – today own a mobile phone. In 2015, 64 percent of American adults owned a smartphone and that percentage has grown to almost 77 percent in recent years. For adults aged 18 to 29, a whopping 94 percent own smartphones, according to Pew Research Center.
While the growing popularity of smartphones is often seen as “progress”, it is also having a monumentally negative impact on the tertiary education sector. The increased use of technology has contributed to the simplification and ease of copying homework assignments – and cheating in general – across schools and tertiary institutions around the world. Despite the fact that repercussions for cheating are severe, involving possible suspension or expulsion, 62% of U.S. students have reported seeing or hearing of another student using a connected device to cheat on an exam, quiz or project. In the U.K., there has been a 42% rise in cheating cases involving gadgets such as mobile phones and hidden earpieces since 2012, and in Australia cheating via technology is also on the rise at universities, with engineering and international students the most likely offenders. In one study across eight national universities and four colleges in Australia, it was found that a “widespread tolerance for cheating” existed among students and staff, with 68 percent of university staff admitting they had found “suspected contract cheaters” among their students in the past.
“Contract cheating” is perhaps the most serious form of academic dishonesty, involving students putting out a tender for others to complete their homework, coursework and assessments. But most students are cheating in a far simpler way: by switching on their mobile devices and snapping a photo of a classmate’s work, enabling them to copy that homework almost word for word in order to avoid doing it themselves. Students are also using mobile phones or earpieces during exams, by activating their device’s infrared, Bluetooth, or texting applications to share exam information with other test takers.
With the rise of technology, academic cheating is becoming more and more prolific, with hundreds of thousands of websites now offering custom-written papers, selling cheat aids and publishing how-to-cheat videos, teaching students anything from how to load programmable calculators with exam responses to how to replace a water bottle’s nutrition information with mathematics notes. Students are cheating in extremely advanced ways – with some even resorting to the use of a virtual private network to protect their activities.
But teachers are catching up, quickly.
The learning center Happy Numbers notes, “using new technologies, including text-matching software and plagiarism websites, webcams, biometric equipment, as well as drawing on strategies such as virtual students and cheat-proof tests, it is ever so slowly becoming harder to plagiarize other students work”. Surprisingly, teachers often find they have the most success in identifying plagiarism by simply Googling phrases they find in students’ papers. But more tech-savvy professors and teachers set up web “honey pots” – phony Web pages that answer specific questions allocated by them for homework with blatantly out-of-date or inaccurate information. Innovative technologies like Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) provide a way of improving the accuracy of assessment by addressing cheating concerns, by using an algorithm to choose test items based on students’ strengths and weaknesses. Using this method, every student takes a different test. As a result of new “anti-cheat” innovations like these, the U.S. has seen the percentage of students who admit to cheating – which rose from 20 percent in the mid-1900s to over 50 percent in 2002 – drop down to around 10 percent in recent years.
But the reality is, advances in technology will continue allowing for easy, accessible sharing unless significant steps are taken to address the problem.
Some attribute the rise in student cheating to an ever-increasing workload, others see it as a changing work ethic seen in the Millenial and Gen Z groups. Some see a direct correlation between the rise of standardized testing and cheating. Others hold accountability policies responsible: they have pressured educators to raise test scores. Whatever the cause, it’s evident the education sector needs to address the phenomenon soon before cheating becomes the status quo, as opposed to a rare lapse in judgment.
To ensure you don’t find yourself falling for the same traps other students have and “accidentally” plagiarizing your next assessment, try to implement the following measures. Develop a more efficient weekly schedule so that you can spend more time on each subject – and assessment – so that when deadlines approach you aren’t tempted to find a “quick solution” to completing your work. If in doubt, don’t copy and paste a piece of work found online but if you must, ensure it is correctly referenced. Don’t give in to peer pressure and share your work with others, because developing a habit of cheating – either for yourself or for others – creates a poor work ethic that can damage your future. And lastly, always remember your ethics. They will get a lot further than an A+ will.
How Microlearning is Stopping Student Burnout Syndrome
BY TIM MONSON
All through our early years and first forays into the world of education, we’re told time and time again that learning requires time, dedication, perseverance. We’re taught that it needs hours, and hours, and hours and while this is true in a sense, it isn’t the whole story. Indeed, many would claim that some of the most effective learning we can partake intakes the same amount of you need to make a decent cup of tea – just ten minutes out of your busy schedule.
That is the essence of microlearning; short bursts of learning which take between ten and fifteen minutes. While it may sound like the latest buzzword in educating, it’s nothing new. Indeed, teachers have been utilizing microlearning for decades. It just didn’t have the catchy title back then.
A typical example we can all relate to is the use of flashcards. Most of us can remember these squares of cardboard being brought out in high school language lessons, for example, and the combination of words and pictures proved to be a quick and straightforward way of getting a concept across. Today, flashcards aren’t just analog tools – they’ve very much entered the digital realm – and they work on the idea that information can sometimes be best imparted in short, sharp bursts. For example, some of top-notch educational blogs on writing use some of microlearning concepts, such as flash cards or data visualization for better comprehension.
What Exactly Is Microlearning?
Educators are always on the lookout for ways to help students bring the information they’ve already learned into new, memorable forms of content. Microlearning is a fantastic way of getting students to use their knowledge, and retain it in their volatile memories.
With just a few ten-minute bursts, students are shown to be more efficient at reiterating concepts and information they’ve been learning, thanks to the hyper-focused and easily digestible format that forms the heart of microlearning. It’s most visibly useful in the worlds of chemistry and mathematics when formulae need to be memorized and utilized, but the concept can also be used efficiently in a wide range of disciplines. Creative, innovative, and very much student-friendly, this new approach is taking the world of education by storm.
Microlearning has also proven to be naturally applicable in the world of social media, too. Tools like Twitter and Snapchat, which base themselves around ‘flashes’ of content – short, sharp, easily consumed – have been critical to its spread and influence, as students are taking to their social media accounts to share their microlearning materials. No doubt university professors and faculty members will be following en masse before too long.
Microlearning: Preventing Student Burnout Syndrome
There’s more pressure than ever before to succeed, and workloads piled onto students often drive them to the breaking point. As studies become more complex, more time-consuming, and ultimately more stressful, approaches like microlearning – which breaks education down into small pieces – may be the solution to the perils of burning out or facing exhaustive overload. Microlearning repeats information in small chunks and allows busy students to synthesize what they’ve learned. They’re more able to connect the dots and utilize their knowledge in context, and it doesn’t strain the brain to the breaking point in the process. Who wouldn’t want a piece of that?
Videos, social media posts, quick puzzles; all of these things are fitting the needs and schedules of today’s busy students far more efficiently than slaving through piles of textbooks. What’s more, as microlearning is mostly a digital approach, the materials can be easily accessed anywhere: in the pub, on the bus, in the bath; the options are endless, and don’t require sitting in dusty libraries all day long!
The Power of Social Media for Microlearning
Social media is the key that will facilitate the rise of microlearning as a discipline. Sites like Facebook have replaced traditional conduits of communication and education alike, and have formed the landscape with which today’s students are most familiar. Indeed, students today engage in microlearning on social media all the time, without necessarily realize they’re doing so. The quick instructional video – whether for baking a cake or conducting a science experiment – is a familiar site on your Facebook wall, and allows lots of knowledge to be imparted quickly, comfortably, and in any setting.By encouraging the use of social media as a learning tool, educators and students alike can utilize sites and systems they’re already highly comfortable with – yet another reason why this approach is tackling the issues of student burnout.
Experts in this field have identified three specific features of successful microlearning. By integrating these things into your studying schedule, you too can avoid that all-consuming sensation of burnout, and study more efficiently for your course or degree. It should:
One of the easiest ways to kickstart this approach is for students in a particular class to establish a course hashtag – #19thcenturyliteratureinLondon – for example. By using this hashtag on Twitter, students can share resources, thoughts, stimulate discussion or share recommendations. The result? Fun, engaging, shareable content which will encourage thought and study outside of the classroom.
This approach is spreading quickly, and it isn’t difficult to see why. Before long, we can expect to see microlearning becoming a crucial part of university life… and considering the effect this has on avoiding student burnout, that can only be a good thing.
Tim Monson is a freelance writer, PhD, student and an active adherent of implementing digital technologies in education.
BY Danika McClure
College students experience a number of factors that may prevent them from maintaining a normal sleep schedule. Living in residence halls, studying for exams, late night courses, social lives, work schedules, family life, homework, and extracurricular activities are all very real stressors that most young college students have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
“There is so much happening on college campuses, both academically and socially, that sleep and rest are very low on most students’ lists of priorities,” writes Huffington Post contributor Jackqueline Baltz.
It’s these busy schedules that have the potential to keep students from getting the sleep they require.
“College and university students tend to keep schedules that are really different from people who are out having jobs in the world,” Dr. Al Glass, then president of the American College Health Association, said in an interview with NPR. “Unfortunately, that’s nothing new. Only 11 percent of college students in a sample of 191 undergrads had good quality sleep, a study in the Journal of American College Health found.”
A lack of sleep combined with other unique stress can have a very real impact not only on students’ health and well-being, but it can also affect their studies in negative ways.
Sleep has an enormous impact on the way students learn. Being deprived of that sleep, in turn, can affect a student’s memory, cognition, and motivation. Those effects only compound when sleep deprivation continues for a long period of time.
“You can see the difference [most starkly] in a morning class,” Garry Fischer, a college admissions experts tells Today. “Students are lethargic, and class participation is minimal. They just can’t engage with their education when they’re forced to work against their circadian rhythms.”
But how can universities and students help to change this pattern?
Many colleges have experimented with making classes start later in the day, or at the very least offering additional options for their college students, and have noticed that students are much more alert, Today reported. Others have tried implementing “snooze rooms” in their libraries to help students who are studying for finals. Perhaps even more accessible is the way that universities have adopted online degree programs in their schools, which offer students the flexibility to work on their own time in order to read up on course materials and complete their courses in a timeframe that makes sense for their schedule.
There are a number of things that students can do to make sure they’re actively prioritizing sleep as a part of their daily self-care routine in order to ensure success in college.
First, for students who are unsure about exactly how much sleep they’re getting on a regular basis, wearable technology, cellphones, and mobile health sensors may be a solution to tracking sleep patterns. From there, students can make adjustments to their lifestyles that can help ensure that their sleep schedule remains intact.
According to the medical experts at Healthline, there are a number of steps students can take in order to get a better night’s sleep. Those steps can include:
In making these changes, they argue, students will find themselves more rested, which will help them overall in their school studies, and ultimately, aid in their overall health and well-being.
Danika McClure is a writer and musician from the northwest who sometimes takes a 30 minute break from feminism to enjoy a tv show. You can follow her on twitter @sadwhitegrrl
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