Open Online Courses and Educational Resources
The Workshops area offers opportunities for faculty and students and university partners to engage in a variety of learning experiences ranging from online self-directed, or guided, skills development; preparation for taking exams; webinars and short courses; opportunities for discussion and peer review. Learning experiences in the Workshops area of the e-Lab may be formal or informal and taken for a range of credits or simply for self-improvement.
A Quick and Dirty Guideline to Academic Essay Writing Success (1st and 2nd Year)
This Workshop will take you through a few pointers which will help you better prepare for, audition, edit, review, and submit your academic papers. It will provide some fundamental concepts, counter some bad advice you need to unlearn, and give you some final tips on paper preparation. In the end you should be able to begin thinking about how to write and review your academic research papers.
Academic Integrity: Avoiding Plagiarism
Students registered in an Athabasca University course are considered to be responsible scholars. As such, you are expected to adhere rigorously to principles of intellectual integrity.Intellectual integrity is a valuable skill learned by successful students. It is important that you practice and strive to conform to the high standards of academic honesty so you avoid even unintentional errors in judgment; for example, being negligent about citing works, incorrectly documenting sources, or paraphrasing a source too closely or without acknowledgment.
Beginning to “DH” : A very introductory workshop on using introductory digital humanities tools
The first thing you need to decide is why you want to do DH. What is the benefit? What do you hope to achieve? These seem like simple questions, but they are at the foundation of figuring out what DH can offer you.
This workshop will take you through three tools, Wordle, Voyant, and Zotero, which will allow you to get a taste of some of the fundamental concepts behind digital humanities. You will need to find some digital texts to work with. If you don’t have one on hand, try exploring Project Gutenberg or The Internet Archive for open source material to play around with.
Comic Book Software for Digital Storytelling
Comics are the fastest growing art form, and they are becoming an influential medium in every form, from novels to films to smart phone apps. This workshop will show you how to use Comic Life Software to create digital comics with your own photographs or remixed image.
Editing Digital Images Workshop: From 0 to 60
Welcome to the “Editing Digital Images Workshop: From 0 to 60” from the e-Lab at Athabasca University. This course will give you an introduction into how to edit images using the free online software, Photobucket. Photobucket can be found at photobucket.com.
Library Research Skills
This module defines scholarly writings and how to find them in the Athabasca University Library. You will need these skills in order to complete the assignments for this course and most other university courses. The module also suggests which library tutorials and study guides you should consult in order to improve your research skills. You will need access to the Internet as you work through Skills Module 1 and Quiz 1. You should also have handy the book by Jules R. Benjamin, A Student's Guide to History, which was included in your course package.
Online Writing
The easiest way to grasp the differences between online writing and feature writing can be found with simple shift of perspective. Think of yourself as a content provider rather than a writer.
Please see the following workshop to find some ways to work through the perspective shift you need to become a good writer for online plantforms.
Organizing a History Essay
This Module will provide you with an overview of the features, elements, and organization of a history essay. There is no quiz for this module - you will show off your skills when you write your research essay and answer the final examination.
The Very Very Basic Building Blocks of a Webpage: Structuring Content
In this, the first of two short introductory tutorials, you will learn how to begin to build a webpage using Hypertext Markup Language, specifically HTML5. In the second tutorial, we will be applying the design elements to the page using a Cascading Style Sheet, or CSS3. However, here you will be laying out bare bone website content (Doctype Declaration, Head Tag, Header Elements, Body Tag, Hyperlinks, Images, and Lists) using the HTML tagging schema. There are a great number of things you can add to a website, but this will get you started for on a single webpage. You will test the preliminary schema simply by dragging the file into your browser window, so there is no need to worry about uploading the file yet. There are examples of HTML all over the web; for most pages you can right-click on page to “view source.” This may seem somewhat intimidating at first, but once you can start to see the basic structures, you will be able to see the logic behind the tags and how they are formatted.
The Wall Street Journal Five-box System
It is often observed that it does not matter what system a writer has, only that the writer has a system. Experience has proven that writers without some sort of system tend to be unsuccessful and disorganized.
In this workshop, learners will be taught the Wall Street Journal Five-Box System. This is a system that facilitates ordering and organization of research materials. It is applicable to journalism, academic writing, PR and business writing.
