Road 2 Graduation

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This weeks R2G Sunday review is that of academictips.org, which is an American based site providing information and tips for students in Academia. Topics covered are note taking in lecturers, how to manage your time and improve your memory, to name just a few.

When you first come to the site, navigation seems pretty simple, as there’s a number of links to other pages that cover more specific topics. However, I don’t like the animation of the student and plant on the left as it seems too ‘false’. Also, I’m not sure if the site is sponsored by the Website host button at the bottom, or whether it’s an affiliate link to earn the site some money – a bit confusing for my intriguing mind to say the least.

I like the way the site has so many different areas of tips and advice from other students, such as:

• Memory Techniques
• Multiple choice exam tips
• Note taking techniques and tips – for lecturers
• How to think critically

As most of the content is added by users (presumably anyway) this brings a little difference to the drone of one writer or commenter. Different views and opinions are expressed through these different ‘voices’ and this allows you to pick up certain techniques from different students – we all think, act, research and learn in different ways, hence having multiple students post their tips is a good way to diversify learning tips and techniques. If the site had tips from professors/lecturers on the above subjects, then this would make the site more reliable and trustworthy – they do state that they accept and publish lecturer’s tips, but they don’t make it clear which ones are which and if they have any tips from experienced academics.

Duplicate content

The site also reproduces content in the form of 7 tips to writing a superior research paper, but it isn’t clear whether this content has been taken directly from Petersons.com, or whether petersons have given permission, or written the article and submitted it to academictips.org. This could bring to mind other information that could be on the Internet that is contained on the academictips.org website, but without further research one wouldn’t know the answer for definite.

Navigation

Navigating through the site is pretty easy and as previously mentioned the links on the home page, as well as the links in various sections, really do pinpoint articles, tips and resources. Much easier is the ‘top viewed tips’ on the homepage, which makes it really easy to navigate to the page or pages that you want in that particular category.

Overall

The site has some good content, although it could do with a little more – I’d never heard about the site until I clicked a link to it a couple of months ago and looking through the information I thought it was a decent resource.

Looking at the site’s backlinks in Google, a number of .edu links do directly link to the site, identifying that this site could be termed as a trustworthy resource. However, having some duplicate content issues I feel devalues the site in many ways.

Not wanting to ‘nit pick’ and knowing that the site owner wants to earn some revenue from the supply of free tips, it feels as if the Adsense ads become annoying after a while and frustrating. The only positive note on this is that the ads are at the top of the page and not contained in the content of the article/tips information, which I find even worse and contained in many other resource sites for students.

Academictips.org does provide many tips for students in academia. Some people may see a few of the tips as being a little below their mature reading age and consider them for younger readers, but, whatever stage you are at in your academic career most of these tips will be useful to you.  The site reminds me of other resources that I read and does provide me with a ‘kick up the behind’, or could build a foundation where I could go and research other sources to build upon this knowledge.

Overall a valuable resource, that you need to read and keep up-to-date with.