Learning Online: Searching and Researching (by Leeds University)

Hi everyone,

This time I am going to share with you my experience joining MOOC from Leeds University and it is about learning online: searching and researching. I found that this MOOC is interesting and useful. Interesting because this time is millennial where almost everybody looks for information through the searching engine. There are plenty of searching engines but Google is the most favorite one!.

There are some searching tools mentioned in the course and it is really new for me. Those new searching tools are https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en, https://www.worldcat.org/, and https://www.refseek.com/. 

I also learn from the course that I can find the information that I am looking for through searching engine easily by using 'operators', like AND, OR, and NOT. For example, Richard III AND Shakespeare, or Richard III OR war of the roses. After we find the information about Richard III, we can post our research results in padlet! and here is the link to our result https://padlet.com/dlt/searchingandresearching24 and https://padlet.com/dlt/researching. 

Here are some of the result of online surveys conducted by Leeds University in this course.

The first survey is about the feeling of users when using the online tools to search the information that they need. There is 9671 respondents answer this questions and about 37% is very unconfident when using online tools. In contrast, there is about 2% who feel very confident in using online tools. 

As we know that there are some searching tools and us, maybe, only use some of those. There are Google, government websites, newspapers, google scholars, blogs, TEDTalks, Broadcasts, etc. About 9.658 from 9959 people who answered this questions mentioned that they use google to find information then followed by government sites about 40% of the respondents. On the last rank, there is ONS and it is about 3% of respondents who use this, not including me because this is the first time for me to know this searching app.

As the addition, about 4% feel confident about their ability to assess the quality of information that they find online.  The gap between who feel confident and not confident is quite big and it is about 4% and 40% respectively. 

The last survey is about how confident of the respondents in combining information from multiple sources that they find online for their work. It is about 3480 respondents of 9812 who participate in this survey answer that they feel not confident in combining the information and only 6% who feel confident in combing information that they find.

They also mention a wonderful website where we can create timeline. We can access it in this link https://www.tiki-toki.com/.

In my opinion, using online searching tools to find the information that we need is helpful because we can save our time and energy. But, as a user, we need to be critical in receiving the information. We need to know what kind of data that we need for us and its originality. Anyway, thank you for Leeds University through Futurelearns who make this course as an open access for everyone!