This page might also be titled "Why do I need a professor when the internet has all the answers?"
Can the internet provide you with accurate and fast answers in the following scenarios? Perhaps. Write down the websites where you find the accurate information. Take no more than five minutes for each scenario.
<aside> 💡 Scenario 1: Your grandmother threw away the directions for her pain medication. What is the correct dose of pain reliever for your 80 year-old grandmother who has diabetes and is recovering from COVID?
</aside>
<aside> 💡 Scenario 2: You are the scheduler for a remodeling company that needs to schedule a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, a cabinet maker, and a roofer to work at an apartment over four weeks. Each worker needs 20 hours to complete their work, and the cabinet maker must split their work over a weekend to allow glue to dry. Because of COVID, no two workers can be in the apartment at the same time and there needs to be 16 hours between each of their visits. What website can help you decide on the best order for the workers and how to communicate to the apartment landlord who will be in the apartment and when?
</aside>
<aside> 💡 Scenario 3: Your religious institution wants to mark its 50th anniversary with a Zoom call for all the living relatives of the founders. How can you find the original members of your religious institution?
</aside>
All set?
You may have struggled to find accurate answers on the internet for these scenarios. That is not surprising. The amount of information on the internet is vast, and finding accurate information is incredibly difficult.
Gaining access to accurate information for college and life is fairly simple on the internet: you type a URL for the right website and receive the correct information. Knowing where to look and, more importantly, what to do with that information is now the central role of faculty at your college.
While faculty are experts in their subjects, faculty expertise is more important now because we have so much more information available. The more information available through the internet, the more faculty will be called on to help you sort that information.
What does this mean for distance digital higher education? Well, for one, faculty are less likely to answer basic fact questions that you can easily find through a credible search, unless recalling that information is important to your career. Health care workers need to know what medicines should not be given together, but historians do not need to memorize dates.
More importantly, you need to develop good habits for evaluating the credibility of information so that your work with faculty can focus on figuring out how act with information. Your college librarians can help you learn how to evaluate credible information. There are also short tutorials on the web, like this one called Check, please!, that help you develop online information literacy.
Image and link for information credibility course Check, Please!
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