“Blogging“- the name that has been making rounds of talking for all the good reasons and benefits that it offers along with the delivered comforts. People are seen getting attracted with its popularity and are tempted for trying their hands with it.
It just not only help the businesses or bloggers to gain a steady reputation and a decent source of income but now has expanded its range to almost the sectors of the world. The latest one making the list is the education sector.
Blogging now is being used for an academic purpose in many schools and university to help their students in gaining an exponential potential in writing and to give them exposure to the unlimited benefits of academic blogging.
Just to make the term more clear, the blogs written for academic purposes is known as academic blogs. These are not the blogs that students write on any specific course topic but are small articles that the students write on any specific topic as a part of their assessment. This type of writing sessions helps students to develop writing habits and opens them up for a great exposure to the surroundings.
Benefits of Academic Blogging
Many reputed colleges are invoking these academic blogging sessions while many well-known professors are in favor of this style of blogs. They believe that writing academic blogs can help students to polish their skills and develop a new habit of writing. One such believer in the positive impact of academic blogging is Mark Sample an associate professor of Davidson College, North Carolina presents the benefit of academic blogging in a unique way. According to him, some of the most important benefits of academic blogging are:
- Responsibility: He considers that academic blogging is an excellent way to make the students responsible. As the students would be investing their time in writing the content that would be used for assessment they would be pretty responsible for what to post and what not to.
- Interaction: Since blogging will help them to participate in different forums which can be a great platform for the students to interact with other bloggers and learn about a lot of things.
- Create Mindset: This also helps the students to create to develop a mindset and get to know about many new things. Also, it is a great platform that helps the professors to know about the mindset of the students.
Besides the benefits that it offers to the students, the professors also look for some of the essential elements that students must work on to deliver amazing blogs. To include some of the features, the blog should be original, purposeful, should reflect student’s identity.
Is Blogging an Assessment Tool in Institutions?
All these throws light on how important the academic blogs are for the students, but the main question of concern still happens to be the same. Should an academic blog be seen as the assessment tool in educational institute or not?
In order to find the answer about this let us analyze the benefits, it delivers for the students and the teachers.
Benefits to Students
The following can be the benefits that academic blogs will offer to the students:
- Experience: Along, with academic learning related to the subject, this kind of academic blogging session can add on an experience of digital learning experience which will give them a huge exposure.
- Learning: This will also help the students to learn many new things as blogging will help them to get exposed to a transparent world of knowledge.
- Professional training: Such blogging experience helps the students to get trained for a professional dealing and they don’t require any such training when dealing with job situations in future.
- Give chances: It helps the shy and introvert students to show up their talent and to come up and portray their talents in the best form of their writing.
Benefits to Educators
Besides the mentioned benefits that it offers to the students, there are many benefits that it offers to the professors as well. Let us have a look:
- Way to know the students: This is the best possible way by which the professors can know the capabilities of the students and find out about their talents and strengths.
- Encourage students: With regularly assessing their blogs professors can help the students to become experts on certain topics and pursue their careers as writers.
- Interactive sessions: Blogging about different topics helps the professors to create transparent yet interactive sessions with the students. Also, the pre-lectures discussions become a great source of motivation for both the students and the staff.
After analyzing so many benefits that academic blogging offers to the future of the student, we would strongly recommend to include such blogging experience in the University so that the students gets an opportunity to brighten their future.
This academic blogging should be taken as an assessment tool in the university to help the students know where they are lacking and in which sector they are shining.
This is our opinion about the involvement of the blogging in the academic assessment tool. What do you think? Comment in your views and suggestions.