Study Support

My Facebook feed is awash with good news and celebration - that means it must be results day! Fellow Open University bods are status-updating their achievements left right and centre and, I tell you, there are some very happy people in OU land today.

I didn’t realise it was results day myself, so it was only upon seeing the proclamations that I thought it wise to check my own StudentHome page and lo-and-behold I’ve passed T227 which means I can now claim the Professional Certificate in ICT Practice. Yey me! A mini celebration is in order tonight I feel.

A day like today is especially nice when you know some of the other students and have met them in person because you’ve had a chance to hear their stories and you know what they’re going through. A particular student I know has finished her BSc now - having received her final results today - and is moving on to do an MA which is superb news because she’s got the intelligence and drive to do really well. Another student has just finished his third - yes THIRD - BA and is moving on to do a BSc in his lifelong learning quest. Such amazing students and some incredible achievements floating around the Facebookosphere today.

It would be utterly heedless and negligent of me, however, to prattle on about all those students who have passed without mention of those who haven’t had such fortunate today. There will, undoubtedly, be students today who have either failed modules or simply not ended up with the grade they either sought or needed.

It has happened to me before - any regular readers will know that I failed a module only last year which just so happened to be the final module of my BSc. That sinking feeling upon realising you’ve not passed is just utterly engulfing. I use the words ‘not passed’ because ‘fail’ is such a negative way to look at it, and if there’s one thing I learned from failing it’s that it’s far from the end of the world. Given a bit of hindsight I find things always make more sense. When I failed that final module I thought my world was caving in, but I got the chance to resubmit and now it’s something I can shrug off and put down to experience.

I feel for any student who hasn’t achieved what they planned for today. This is not always an easy thing to do so I tip my bonnet to each and every one of you who has had the guts to at least try - it’s people like you who inspire me, not the natural super- academics who always get first class everything but those who are putting in the graft and really trying. There’s a motivational motto I picked up from running which is really appropriate here when put into a studying context: “No matter how slow you go, you’re still lapping everyone on the sofa”.

Grades aren’t everything; they count for something, obviously, but don’t fixate on them. After all, you’re doing far better than anyone who thought about registering but didn’t.

 

Ever wondered about your digital footprint? Or wondered who or what you can trust online? OU Library Services recently launched a new website called Being Digital to help you do just that.

Being Digital is a collection of short, easy-to-follow activities on finding, using and creating information online that will help you become a confident and critical user of digital tools and resources for study, work and in everyday life. 
 

You’ll find activities on:

• Making the most of online networks
• Managing your digital identity
• Using Wikipedia
• Evaluating and using online tools
• Searching effectively

Each chunk of learning should take no more than 10 minutes to complete, making it easy to fit Being Digital activities into your schedule. You can decide how you would like to use the site; you can select individual activities by browsing an A-Z list or follow a specific pathway to give you a deeper understanding of a topic.

To find out more about how Being Digital can help you develop essential skills for your studies, work or everyday life, visit the website.
 

The OU has widened access to academic research material, making it much easier for academics, researchers and students to find and download academic papers.

Access has been vastly improved through the OU's Open Access search facility CORE, thanks to technical leaps in this innovative system created by the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi).

CORE - which stands for COnnecting REpositories - has seen unprecedented success in the past year and has more than tripled in size, now offering content from a global network of repositories, freely available to scholars worldwide.

CORE provides a large easy-to-search database to help academics, researchers and students to find, explore and download research papers. When the service was first launched in 2011 CORE could source material in 60 repositories –but today it aggregates data from over 230 internationally plus content from thousands of Open Access journals acquired through the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). This means the service holds more than nine million metadata items and about half a million full text files.

'CORE is not only a search system, it is a free platform for developing applications that need access to the full-text of research articles. A very large amount of data is now available'

Funding from JISC is permitting the project to develop further analytical processes with DiggiCORE project, which will utilise social media tools.

Unlike other Open Access scholarly search systems, CORE also aggregates the full-text files, and not only metadata, and therefore ensures the publication full-texts are freely available for download. Users of commercial academic search systems, such as Google Scholar, can be denied access to the full article, particularly when subscription fees are required. 

The reason for CORE’s success rise is clear, says software designer and founder Peter Knoth: “A huge amount of research papers have been available online as Open Access, but there was limited technical infrastructure that would support different kinds of users in exploiting it. CORE is not only a search system, it is a free platform for developing applications that need access to the full-text of research articles. A very large amount of data is now available through the CORE API. The CORE Linked Open Data repository has this month already grown to 100 million RDF triples making it by far the largest Linked Open Data repository at the Open University.

“CORE has created a resource which offers some intriguing possibilities. The API to the aggregation puts this valuable information into the hands of researchers and developers and offers them the chance to use it in new and better ways,”  added Andy McGregor, the JISC manager of the Resource Discovery programme. 

CORE is now available for flexible use online and on mobile devices and tablets and is already benefiting journals, scholars, at conferences and as technical support answering the demand for Open Access to academic research papers.