Tag: study skills

Whether you are new to using a computer, feel you could benefit from refreshing or improving your computing skills, or you want to develop your technical and digital skills further, you may find some of the resources below useful.

Make it work for YOU

Once you have set up your computer or tablet, and are able to access your email and the internet, there are a number of adjustments you can make to your browser or equipment to study more comfortably and productively.

For example, if you:

• like to have text read out to you rather than reading it on screen,
• prefer dictating your essays or forum messages rather than typing them,
• need to change the font or text size to be able to read it, or,
• feel you would benefit from removing distractions on screen to improve your focus.

Please have a look at the accessibility page where we share some tips to use widely available free tools to become a more effective online learner.

Become a digital scholar

Refer to our Study Help pages to discover digital tools and strategies to help in your studies. For example, how to keep track of online sources and links with bookmarking tools and tips for effective online searches.

We would also recommend you browse the Bodleian Library How-to guides to support your studies.

Fact-checking, assessing online sources, and managing your digital footprint are essential skills for digital scholars to develop. They are more widely part of ‘digital literacy’ which can help in your future studies and beyond. If this is something you’d like to learn more about, Coursera, FutureLearn and other MOOC platforms offer free courses on digital literacy and skills.

Develop your digital skills

Whether you are a basic or advanced user, there are ways to develop your skills and become more confident, or faster using your computer or specific software. You can find many tips and courses to suit your needs and preferences online.

Students who are registered on an award-bearing course (i.e. students with SSO login details) are eligible to enrol on a range of IT training courses offered by the University of Oxford’s IT Services department. You can find out more from the Digital Capabilities Centre.

There are many search engines that you can use to find information on the web, some search the whole web, such as Google (read Google search guidance) and Bing (read Bing search guidance) while others focus on certain areas or search within specific databases such as a library catalogue. Some will even produce AI-generated summary, sometimes providing links to the sources used in compiling it.

General tips

The Bodleian Education Library has produced some guides on Using Google for Academic Research.

However your search engine of choice works, there are several things to do before starting a search.

• Try and think of the key ideas or concepts that define the topic you are interested in.
• Think of different words for the terms you have chosen; for example United Kingdom and Great Britain are often used interchangeably.
• Consider plurals, abbreviations and variations in spelling or terminology (especially between the US and UK).

It is always worth searching on multiple versions of the words you have chosen to ensure you are more likely to find the most relevant sites. You may want to start with a general search to give yourself an overview and then focus in on the details.

Often searching on the web as a whole produces an unmanageable number of results. To deal with this you may want to restrict your search to trusted sources; suggestions of places to start are listed on the information sources page.

Remember that wherever you find information it is important to read it critically. If you are a short course student there is more information about this on the Assessing information page in the Getting started book which you can access from your course homepage.

Further help

If you found this page useful you may like to explore the information on our other Study help pages.

What are these?

With the lack of quality control on the web and the proliferation of AI-generated content, you will often encounter inaccurate information as part of your search results. One way of ensuring the quality of your sources is to use those that have been judged as suitable by a trusted authority. They may use traditional publishing accreditation processes such as peer review which help ensure the information is accurate and reliable.

As with all the information sources you use, you should still use the ideas outlined in the Assessing information screen (in the Getting started section of your course) to make your own judgements about the sources you find. Consider the Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy and Purpose of your information source to evaluate its reliability (read more about the CRAAP Test). For images and videos, you could also try to find other images of the same event or people to spot any differences or inaccuracies, or do a reverse-image search. The BBC compiled a few strategies to recognise deepfakes and AI-generated images.

Continuing Education Library

You can explore resources provided by the Continuing Education Library. The team of librarians at the Continuing Education Library have compiled subject-specific lists of resources, which are a great starting point to any research. You can also access a list of digital resources compiled by the Bodleian Library team, some of which are open-access.

Google scholar

Google Scholar provides a simple way to search for scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, which include: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organisations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research.

Oxford University Press online resources

Oxford University Press (OUP) online resources are a comprehensive subscription-based online resource that contain thousands of items covering a wide range of subject areas. Students of Oxford Lifelong Learning’s award-bearing courses can access these resources through the University’s library catalogue (SOLO) using their Oxford username.

Short online course students can access these through the ‘OUP Online Resources’ block on their online course homepage. The Oxford University Press Online Resources page provides further information for short online course students about the OUP online resource collections available, including details of how to access and search them.

Digital Libraries and journals

DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) covers free, full-text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals.

Books

There are a growing number of schemes to make books available online. The following are some of the largest sources for public domain and open source texts:

• Hathi Trust
• Project Gutenberg
• Bibliomania
• Google Books

Many Universities and Public Libraries also have digital collections, such as Digital Bodleian or the British Library.

Open educational resources

A growing number of universities release free educational content as Open Educational Resources (OER). You can discover these on most universities’ websites. Some examples are:

• OER from the University of Oxford
• OER from the Open University

If you want a more general resource, OER Commons is a good place to start.

Lectures, podcasts and videos

Many universities and other organisations make freely available a wide range of podcasts, videos of lectures and other learning resources. Popular sites to find these resources include:

• University of Oxford podcasts
• YouTube Education
• TED Talks

A note about Wikipedia

When researching specific topics, Wikipedia will often appear as it has entries about almost anything. Wikipedia enables all users to contribute or edit content, and it contains information on a huge range of topics. However, because content can be contributed, or changed, by anyone at any time, it should not be regarded as an authoritative source. It is safest to think of Wikipedia as ‘work in progress’, and it is always advisable to corroborate any information found there from an additional, authoritative source. Wikipedia articles should contain lists of references, and that’s a good place to start – following up those references will help to put the Wikipedia article in context. For more information see Reliability of Wikipedia.

Further help

If you found this page useful you may like to explore the information on our other Study help pages.

As you study and research online, you will no doubt discover resources and websites you would like to save and revisit. Bookmarks can help you organise and manage these resources. You can ‘bookmark’ websites that you will want to come back to using your web browser. You can have as many bookmarks as you want, and you can organise them in folders, categories etc. You can also use more advanced bookmarking tools to keep track and manage your bookmarks.

How could they help me with my learning?

By keeping all your information about bookmarks in one place, and making it easy to find and sort them using tags, bookmarking tools make retrieving information much more straightforward.

Basic bookmarking tools

In most browsers you can quickly save a bookmark by clicking the or sign in the address bar. Alternatively, you can use the following commands:

• Chrome: Bookmarks > Bookmark this tab,
• Microsoft Edge: Favorites > Add to favorites,
• Mozilla Firefox: Bookmarks > Bookmark this page,
• Safari: Bookmarks> Add bookmark.

Next time you want to access your bookmarked site, you can go to your Bookmarks section to quickly access the link you saved. In order to access your bookmarks from a different computer or device, you may need to sign in to your browser.

Advanced bookmarking tools

Alternatively, web-based bookmarking tools exist that allow you to collect your bookmarks on one website and access them from any computer. Additionally, bookmarking tools:

• enable you to categorise your links through the use of tags (classifications that you can devise to help you retrieve links on related topics), add notes and annotate documents,
• allow you to share your bookmarks with anyone else who uses the same tool (though you can choose to keep some or all of your links private), and
• help you explore resources and curated lists shared by other users.

Social bookmarking services tend to be free to use. Here are a few sites which have useful features to support your learning process and essay preparation:

• Wakelet allows you to save and organise web content in your own space,
• BibSonomy and Zotero can help you collect, discover, organise and comment on academic sources,
• Diigo has tools to collect, organise, annotate and share bookmarks.

Further help

If you found this page useful you may like to explore the information on our other Study help pages.

If you are studying our short online courses, you will have access to a selection of subscription-based online resources from Oxford University Press (OUP), at no additional cost. The material is limited to the subject areas covered by our subscription.

You must have cookies enabled on your browser in order to use the Oxford University Press Online Resources. To check if you have cookies enabled visit the WhatIsMyBrowser site. If you are unsure how to enable cookies on your browser you can find instructions for most browsers in this WikiHow article.

How to access OUP resources

Where possible, we have included direct links to OUP material in the course, in which case you can simply follow the link to access the resource. You do not need to log in to any of the sites. If you do not use the links via the Moodle platform, you will not be able to access the OUP resources.  

You may also want to browse the resources for your own research or as part of a course activity. You can do so in a few simple steps.

From your course homepage, open the menu drawer by clicking the arrow in the blue roundel in the top right-hand corner of the screen :

1. When the menu opens, scroll down to the OUP Online Resources block (below the NAVIGATION menu block )
2. Follow the link and select the resource you wish to access.
3. From the list that opens, click on the link to your chosen OUP site
4. Use the search box on the site to find material (further details below)

Each browsing session lasts 30 minutes. If you wish to continue using the resource after this point you will need to follow the link from your course again in order to regain access.

Searching the available resources

Whilst we provide access to a huge number of resources our subscription does not cover everything that is on the sites listed below. If you want to filter out any unavailable content (indicated by a closed padlock ), follow the instructions below.

Search Oxford Reference Online Core Collection

Search Oxford Academic

I’m still having trouble accessing the resources

If after you have tried: 

• Closing your browser tab, 
• Clicking the link in your course page, 
• Following the link to OUP resources from your course homepage, 

And you are still having trouble accessing OUP resources, you can Contact us.