When you become a university student for the first time–as we know many of you will be doing over the next couple of weeks–the first week is probably about 80% social-life related and no more than 20% or so linked to the basic administrative business of registering and getting ready for the coming semester of study.
But the week after that, those two percentages are more or less reversed (well, depending on how diligent a student you are). The switch can come as a bit of a nasty shock for the student who is not prepared for it. Having spent the last week floating around freshers’ events, they’re now being expected to know things like how to access course reading lists and access journal articles.
However, help is at hand, though you need to know where to look for it. And where to look is online, at your university’s website. Although when you log onto your university’s homepage the pictures of smiling students posing for the camera may make you think it’s just a tool for selling the university to prospective students, it will also be packed with information and resources that you will need to survive as a student. It therefore pays to get to know which sections of the site will be of most use to you. And they’ll be the following:
The library site
Your university’s library will have a sizable website all of its own. Its use extends far beyond providing you with library opening hours. For one thing, it’ll host the all-important online catalogue of books, journals and electronic resources that students need to survive their degree. But wait, there’s more! Not only will it in many cases provide you with links to digital versions of said books and articles, but it’ll also have all sorts of resources that will explain how to navigate your way through the dense forest of study materials that you’ll be expected to consult, as well as help you to understand areas such as plagiarism.
Moodle, Blackboard or other virtual learning environment
A typical first-semester exchange between a lecturer and students will go like this: students turn up to a seminar having done no work beforehand. Lecturer asks why they didn’t do the reading they’d been set. Students say they didn’t know there was any. Lecturer says the work to be done was all available on Moodle/Blackboard/some other oddly named website. Students stare back blankly.
Most universities nowadays will use some sort of virtual learning environment as the backbone for course business, from sending out reminders about essays to providing lecture notes, reading lists, links to reading materials and course handbooks. In other words, if you’re not actively and regularly using the VLE, you’re probably setting yourself up for the awkward situation described above.
Exam timetables and study regulations
Unlike when you’re at school, university students are expected to look up all the rules governing life for themselves. But because many of these rules and procedures are different to what they experienced at school, many students are blissfully unaware of them. The result is that people get themselves into a pickle by inadvertently committing plagiarism, show up to the wrong exams or aren’t allowed to sit them because they didn’t bring their university ID with them.
Again, all these things can be avoided if you take the time to look the information up on the university’s website. Like out in the real world, universities won’t accept ignorance as an excuse for breaking their rules, and especially not when they publish all of them online.