The Union Institute & University community has free access to The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times. It is now easier than ever to read world-class journalism using these school-wide subscriptions.
“The Chronicle of Higher Education has the nation’s largest newsroom dedicated to covering colleges and universities. As the unrivaled leader in higher education journalism, we serve our readers with indispensable real-time news and deep insights, plus the essential tools, career opportunities, and knowledge to succeed in a rapidly changing world.” –The Chronicle Website
The diverse coverage will be of interest to many, with sections devoted to teaching, administration, leadership & governance, faculty, research, publishing, technology, finance, admissions, student aid, graduate students, campus spaces, and technology. The Chronicle also provides a variety of newsletters focused on teaching, educational technology, quick tips, and news briefings delivered daily or weekly.
Students, faculty, and staff members can access to the Chronicle of Higher Education using their regular MyUnion username and password. Note: you can ignore the subscribe/login information in the top, right-hand corner of the Chronicle website. Creating a personal account is only needed for posting comments and subscribing to newsletters.
“The New York Times is dedicated to helping people understand the world through on-the-ground, expert and deeply reported independent journalism.” –The NYT Website
The paper covers a variety of topics with unsurpassed quality and depth through breaking news articles, blogs, videos and interactive features. Faculty members can visit the New York Times in Education website for a curated collection of teaching resources and ideas about how to integrate NYT content into online courses. To activate your pass, visit UI&U’s group pass page. Select Create Account. Enter your information and choose a personal account password. You will need to reauthorize your Pass once every 365 days from the UI&U group pass page. Once activated, your Pass will provide access to New York Times website or mobile apps from any location. Visit the New York Times website to login and begin your free subscription today.
UI&U Group Pass Page (for account set-up and re-authorization every 365 days)
New York Times Website (begin reading the New York Times)
New York Times in Education (curated educational content for courses)
If you have any questions about these subscriptions, please contact a librarian at library@myunion.edu or 513-487-1487.
The Films on Demand collection includes a Teaching Online Mastercourse from Makematic. The Teaching Online Mastercourse consists of a 61 video series covering a variety of topics including best practices, universal design, discussions, student success and engagement, feedback and assessment,
To view additional Films on Demand videos, please browse by subject area.
Open-access textbooks, journals, images, videos, and other educational resources has been one of the most exciting developments in academic scholarship during the last two decades. In response to the rising costs of academic publishing and higher education, many concerned scholars have decided to publish their work with open copyright licenses. These open access resources are free to everyone without hindrance of subscription fees, licensing terms, logins, contracts, and other barriers. They provide universal access to research and knowledge.
Faculty, below is a compilation of some of the most popular websites for open access textbooks and educational resources. If you are interested in learning more about how you can incorporate these resources into your course, please let a UI&U Librarian know. We would be happy to help.
Open Educational Resources, Open Textbooks
Includes textbbooks from the Open Textbook Library, Open Textbooks SUNY, Open Stax, Open Oregon & more.
From a single point of access in OER Commons, you can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons’ growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER. -Website Description
The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers…The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder webpages, together with associated comments, and bookmark collections, all intended to enhance the teaching experience of using a learning material. -Website Description
Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it. Some of our major resource collections include: 1,300 Free Online Courses from Top Universities, 1,150 Free Movies, Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc., 900 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices, MOOCs from Great Universities (Many With Certificates), Learn 46 Languages Online for Free: Spanish, Chinese, English & More, 200 Free Kids Educational Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Websites & More. -Website Description
Video tutorials for math, computer programing, statistics, economics, art history, history, grammar, biology, anthropology, and personal finance.
Creative Commons & Public Domain Pictures
Pictures can make a presentation or course come alive. So how can you find pictures that are copyright-safe and freely available? One strategy is to use pictures in the public domain or creative commons. Public domain images are out of copyright and have no restrictions about how they can be used. Creative commons images can be used in accordance with their creative commons license.
Popular websites for public domain images include the PublicDomainArchive and pixabay.
The Creative Commons Search is your portal to creative commons licensed images on popular websites like YouTube, Flickr, Google Images, Europeana, and Jamendo. Creative Commons Kiwi (short video about using Creative Commons)
UI&U Library & OneSearch
While most resources in the UI&U Library are not open access, they are freely available to the UI&U Academic Community. To access library resources, go to the library homepage and enter keywords in OneSearch. Search results can be limited by publication date (last few years), source type (ebooks and books), and availability to “available online (full text)”. Another strategy is to use the publisher limiter to limited to common textbook publishers such as Taylor & Francis, SAGE, Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Oxford, Cambridge, Open Textbook Library, and University Presses.
Library Videos: academic success ● African American studies ● anthropology ● business & economics ● career & job search ● childcare ● child & adolescent development ● criminal justice ● environmental science ● education (see also Education in Video) ● English ● health, medicine, and wellness ● history ● leadership ● literature ● parenting & child development ● philosophy & religion ● political science ● public health ● psychology & counseling (see also Counseling & Therapy in Video and Psychotherapy.net) ● social inequality ● social work ● special education ● women’s & gender studies
UI&U Library Tutorial
Adding Library Resources to Courses
Pictures can make a presentation or course come alive. So how can you find pictures that are copyright-safe and freely available? One strategy is to use public domain or creative commons pictures.
Artistic, Bright, Color, Colored, Colorful, Colors by Public Domain Images Creative Commons CC0
Public domain images are out of copyright and have no restrictions about how they can be used. Although it is a best practice to include an citation with your image, there are no legal requirements. Popular websites for locating public domain images include the PublicDomainArchive and pixabay.
Creative commons images can be used in accordance with their creative commons license. For example, a creator may require non-profit use or attribution. The Creative Commons Search is your portal to creative commons licensed images on popular websites like YouTube, Flickr, Google Images, Europeana, and Jamendo.
Congratulations! You are nearing the end of your academic journey! Now comes the final challenge…writing your master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation. There are many resources that will help you to plan, research and create your culminating work. Faculty supervisors, we’ve also included a few titles for you. Your UI&U Librarians have highlighted some favorites, but there are many more dissertation handbooks in OneSearch. We welcome any suggestions from students and faculty about other ebooks that would help to improve our collection, so please let us know of any helpful and interesting titles!
They Say, I Say
Available in audiobook format
“The New York Times best-selling book on academic writing―in use at more than 1,500 schools.
“They Say / I Say” identifies the key rhetorical moves in academic writing, showing students how to frame their arguments in the larger context of what others have said and providing templates to help them make those moves.” -Publisher
Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword
Available in ebook and audiobook format
“Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression, argues Helen Sword in this lively guide to academic writing. For scholars frustrated with disciplinary conventions, and for specialists who want to write for a larger audience but are unsure where to begin, here are imaginative, practical, witty pointers that show how to make articles and books a pleasure to read―and to write. Dispelling the myth that you cannot get published without writing wordy, impersonal prose, Sword shows how much journal editors and readers welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Sword’s analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a wide range of fields documents a startling gap between how academics typically describe good writing and the turgid prose they regularly produce. Stylish Academic Writing showcases a range of scholars from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences who write with vividness and panache. Individual chapters take up specific elements of style, such as titles and headings, chapter openings, and structure, and close with examples of transferable techniques that any writer can master.” -Publisher
Writing a Proposal for Your Dissertation: Guidelines and Examples. This user-friendly guide helps students get started on–and complete–a successful doctoral dissertation proposal by accessibly explaining the process and breaking it down into manageable steps. Steven R. Terrell demonstrates how to write each chapter of the proposal, including the problem statement, purpose statement, and research questions and hypotheses; literature review; and detailed plan for data collection and analysis. Of special utility, end-of-chapter exercises serve as building blocks for developing a full draft of an original proposal. Numerous case study examples are drawn from across the social, behavioral, and health science disciplines. Appendices present an exemplary proposal written three ways to encompass quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods designs. –Publisher’s description
Destination Dissertation: A Traveler’s Guide to a Done Dissertation. Dissertations aren’t walls to scale or battles to fight; they are destinations along the path to a professional career. Destination Dissertation is a handbook that helps students successfully develop and complete their dissertations. It uses travel as a metaphor framing the process as an exciting trip of 29 steps that can be completed in less than nine months. Designed for use by students in all disciplines and for both quantitative and qualitative dissertations, the book shows concrete and efficient processes for completing those parts of the dissertation where students tend to get stuck, from conceptualizing a topic to editing the final work. It includes a wealth of real-life examples from throughout the dissertation process, such as creating the proposal and coding data. This time-tested method comes from the authors’ successful work at the Denver-based Scholars’ Retreat. –Publisher’s description
Doing a literature review by J. Knopf
Students entering a graduate program often encounter a new type of assignment that differs from the papers they had to write in high school or as college undergraduates: the literature review (also known as a critical review essay). Put briefly, a literature review summarizes and evaluates a body of writings about a specific topic. The need to conduct such reviews is by no means limited to graduate students; scholarly researchers generally carry out literature reviews throughout their research careers. In a world where the Internet has broadened the range of potentially relevant sources, however, doing a literature review can pose challenges even to an experienced researcher.In drafting this overview, I have incorporated some points made by Paul Pitman in a lecture delivered to students at the Naval Postgraduate School. I have also incorporated some suggestions contained in a handout prepared by John Odell for students in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. -Extract
Writing the literature review: A practical guide. by S. E. Efron & R. Ravid
This accessible text provides a roadmap for producing a high-quality literature review–an integral part of a successful thesis, dissertation, term paper, or grant proposal. Each step of searching for, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing prior studies is clearly explained and accompanied by user-friendly suggestions, organizational tips, vignettes, and examples of student work. Also featured are excerpts from peer-reviewed quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods articles. This is the first book to focus on crafting different types of reviews (systematic, traditional–narrative, or hermeneutic–phenomenological) that reflect the writer’s research question, methodological choices, and approaches to knowledge. It describes what all reviews have in common and highlights distinct characteristics of each type. The book includes dos and don’ts for evaluating studies and constructing an argument, and software suggestions for locating, organizing, and arranging sources. -Publisher’s Description
Revising your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors. The aftermath of graduate school can be particularly trying for those under pressure to publish their dissertations. Written with good cheer and jammed with information, this lively guide offers hard-to-find practical advice on successfully turning a dissertation into a book or journal articles that will appeal to publishers and readers. It will help prospective authors master writing and revision skills, better understand the publishing process, and increase their chances of getting their work into print. This edition features new tips and planning tables to facilitate project scheduling, and a new foreword by Sandford G. Thatcher, Director of Penn State University Press. –Publisher’s description
How to Write a Thesis By the time Umberto Eco published his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, he was one of Italy’s most celebrated intellectuals, a distinguished academic and the author of influential works on semiotics. Some years before that, in 1977, Eco published a little book for his students, How to Write a Thesis, in which he offered useful advice on all the steps involved in researching and writing a thesis -Publisher’s Description Also Available as an Audiobook.
From Dissertation to Book. Since its publication in 2005, From Dissertation to Book has helped thousands of young academic authors get their books beyond the thesis committee and into the hands of interested publishers and general readers. Now revised and updated to reflect the evolution of scholarly publishing, this edition includes a new chapter arguing that the future of academic writing is in the hands of young scholars who must create work that meets the broader expectations of readers rather than the narrow requirements of academic committees… –Publisher’s description
Making the Implicit Explicit: Creating Performance Expectations for the Dissertation Despite their and other stakeholders’ consistent demand for excellence, doctoral programs have rarely, if ever, been assessed in terms of the quality of the dissertations departments produce. Yet dissertations provide the most powerful, objective measure of the success of a department’s doctoral program. Indeed, assessment, when done properly, can help departments achieve excellence by providing insight into a program’s strengths and weaknesses. This book and the groundbreaking study on which it is based is about making explicit to doctoral students the tacit “rules” for the assessment of the final of all final educational products—the dissertation… –Publisher’s description
Understanding Supervision and the PhD. Explores the experience of supervision and the PhD, drawing on a range of key viewpoints to further understanding of this complex educational experience. –Publisher’s description
Designing and Teaching Undergraduate Capstone Courses. Designing and Teaching Undergraduate Capstone Courses is a practical, research-backed guide to creating a course that is valuable for both the student and the school. The book covers the design, administration, and teaching of capstone courses throughout the undergraduate curriculum, guiding departments seeking to add a capstone course, and allowing those who have one to compare it to others in the discipline. The ideas presented in the book are supported by regional and national surveys that help the reader understand what’s common, what’s exceptional, what works, and what doesn’t within capstone courses. -Publisher’s description
Additional Supervision Resources
Reading the top journals in your field is a great way to stay up-to-date, and the library is full of free, peer-reviewed journals!
Popular journals in the library’s collection include: Academy of Management Review, Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, Signs, Journal of Human Lactation, Police Chief, Research on Social Work Practice, and the American Political Science Review.
The library collection even includes popular magazines such as Oprah, The Smithsonian, and Consumer Reports.
Your librarians are ready to help you find the right journals for you, and to set-up alerts so new issues are delivered straight to your inbox! There is also a journals alert tutorial in the library’s help center with journal suggestions and instructions for creating an alert.
Confused about copyright? Interested in learning more about the copyright-safe images, videos, and other resources available for your courses? The library’s Copyright for Online Courses page explains many of the complex issues surrounding copyright. These issues often pose a challenge for dedicated instructors who want to make their courses interesting using multimedia resources. We designed the page with the busy professor in mind. It focuses on the most common issues and questions that can occur in the online course environment.
The copyright page now includes a faculty self-assessment with 14 questions and a drag & drop game faculty can use to sharpen their knowledge about copyright. Enjoy!
Are you planning on publishing? Then you should be aware that not all academic publishers are reputable. One helpful tool in avoiding shady publishers is Beall’s List. Jeffrey Beall is a University of Colorado Librarian who maintains a list of “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers.”
Here is Beall’s List of publishers to avoid.
To find reputable open access journals in your field, search the Directory of Open Access Journals.
You’ve finished the work, and you’re proud of it (as you should be!). But then you begin to wonder: now how do I get this thing published?
Whether you’re looking to sharpen your work through revision, focus on the craft of writing, learn the ins and outs of academic publishing, or focus on online writing, the UI&U Library has you covered. Below is a sample selection of titles to help you polish–and perhaps even publish–your work. For further assistance in accessing similar titles, please feel free to contact us.
Academic Publishing
Mainstream Publishing
Engaging students online can be challenging. But these challenges also create opportunities to teach with new approaches. The library has compiled a selected bibliography of online teaching and pedagogy e-books. The ebooks below can be read by copying & pasting the title into OneSearch. If you have a favorite title you would like to see on this list, please let us know.
Excellent Online Teaching: Effective Strategies for a Successful Semester Online by Johnson 2017
Online Learning in Higher Education by Ghilay 2017
Creating a Sense of Presence in Online Teaching: How to “Be There” for Distance Learners by Lehman and 2010
Discussion-Based Online Teaching to Enhance Student Learning: Theory, Practice and Assessment by Bender 2012
The Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips by Boettcher & Conrad 2016
Digital Technologies in Higher Education: Sweeping Expectations and Actual Effects by Guri-Rozenblit 2009
The Chronicle of Higher Education is the top source for news in post-secondary education. It brings you news stories of concerning faculty, administration and technology as well as academic news from around the global. You also have access to many blogs devoted to different aspects of the university experience (admissions, scholarly publishing or building and grounds) and also to the forums where you can connect with people involved in higher education around the country and around the world.
The UI&U Library provides access to the Chronicle without the additional step of logging on through the library. Simply go to chronicle.com. In the upper right hand corner, click log in. (Don’t subscribe! We’ve done that for you!). Then create a free account using your Union email. Please contact a librarian if you have questions or need assistance.
