The University of Manchester Library has some online resources on study skills. For example:
There are many others – on maths, referencing, revision, statistics, reading, research, etc.
Stack Exchange is a collection of questions and answers on numerous topics.
Some questions from English Language & Usage:
Some questions from English Language Learners:
There aren’t many free practice materials for IELTS on the internet. A website that has recently been recommended by our IELTS teacher Malle is IELTS Mentor. It includes:
See our IELTS page for links to other sites.
JournalTOCs is a collection of the tables of contents of 33,000 academic journals.
You can search for journals, “follow” them and read their tables of contents online. You can also choose to receive emails when new issues come out, or set up an RSS feed.
If UEA has access to a journal, you can read an article by clicking on the link in the table of contents.
A similar service is Zetoc.
If you need background music for a video or slideshow, you could try the Free Music Archive.
The music is arranged by genre – Blues, Classical, Country, Electronic, etc. – and then sub-genre, such as Rock > Loud-Rock > Noise-Rock > Sludge. (More suitable, perhaps, as background music are genres such as Instrumental > Ambient.)
Tracks can be downloaded as mp3 files and then added to your project. Most of them have Creative Commons licences such as Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.
UEA Library has trial access to some online resources. They are expensive, so the library needs to know which are worth keeping. They are:
There is more information on tag (UEA Library blog). You can access all the resources via Find Databases.
Studying Economics offers advice, help and information for economics undergraduates. Besides the tips on study skills, careers, etc., there are some distractions – links to economics-related videos, songs, games, etc.
For example, there’s a catchy song from the Bank of Ghana about their new currency unit and a video of Yoram Bauman, Ph.D., a “stand-up economist”, in which he simplifies Gregory Mankiw’s 10 Principles of Economics for a general audience:
Economic Data freely available online is a collection of links to economic and market data in the UK and other countries.
Do you know what the current inflation rate is in Uzbekistan? The Asian Development Bank can tell you.*
The links are compiled by John Sloman, a name that should be familiar to INTO economics students, for The Economics Network.
*14% for 2019 (forecast)
Ten resources for today’s teacher training session:
physics.org is a guide to physics on the web, published by the Institute of Physics in Britain.
You can search its database of 4,000 physics websites or do some experiments, like the one pictured. There is also information about courses and careers.
If you’re looking for something to read online, there is always fan fiction.
For example, FanFiction has 50,000 stories based on the Star Wars movies and 800,000 inspired by the Harry Potter books. The TV series Father Ted, on the other hand, has produced a measly 15 stories.
On a similar site, Archive of Our Own, there are 50,000 works about the band One Direction. For instance, Fading is 202,393 words, about twice the length of an average novel, and has been translated into Spanish. It starts like this:
Louis almost snaps when there is a light tap on the door of the studio. His knuckles go white on the edge of the cutting table but he forces himself to take a deep breath and put on a smile before he turns around. He isn’t the type to take his frustrations out on others, he prefers to take them out on himself. When he turns he finds Liam poking his head just past the door frame, hesitant to come in and disturb Louis.
Only 202,309 words to go!
FanFiction has a rating system for its stories: basically, K = Kids, T = Teens, M = Mature. The site “does not accept explicit content”. Archive of Our Own’s rating system is G = General, T = Teen, M = Mature, E = Explicit. A lot of fan fiction describes romantic/sexual relationships and this is normally indicated at the beginning of the story, along with any other content warnings.
If you want to read the day’s news in English, here are some sources:
In addition, Nexis provides access to hundreds of news sources in various languages.
