Online Workshops
Besides the regular courses, The University of Edinburgh offers many online workshops about a variety of themes.
I attended sessions on digital skills, data analysis, data science and information security, in which I learned about subjects like "ransomware"; "hacking, cybercrimes and the movies"; "social media marketing"; and "collecting social media data". In the latter, I learned how to use FacePager along with RStudio to collect and present social media data for research. I believe it was the busiest session, and it got fully booked very quickly.
I have also attended excellent workshops on the proper use of the English language, which addressed issues like "effective academic writing", "punctuation" and how to write "abstracts and tiny texts" and "literature reviews". I believe they have improved the quality of my academic writing, making me aware of specific details that differentiate normal from scholarly writing.
Currently, I am focusing my time and effort on workshops about the process of writing the final dissertation. About this topic, sessions on "critical thinking", "critical reading and writing", "dissertations for publications", "research planning" and "beating writer's block" caught my attention.
Workshops are held live through Blackboard Collaborate. Therefore, contrary to regular online courses, they are not asynchronous. Sometimes this is a problem for me since the time zone difference between Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Edinburgh (Scotland) is four hours. It means that if workshops are held early in the morning in Edinburgh, they will too soon for me in Rio. However, since most of the sessions that interested me were offered in the afternoon in Edinburgh, it was not such a big problem.
Interestingly, the workshops are also held during online vacation periods. The activity is not mandatory, but I believe it does help students to receive adequate instruction.
And there are other workshops that look exciting and deal with essential digital skills which I believe every post-graduation student must have nowadays. I highlight "Introduction to Python", "Python for Data Science", "getting started with Microsoft teams", "Introduction to Microsoft Office 365", and "Learning Adobe Spark". All LLM students may attend those sessions, but some are limited to one participation.
Regarding extra online activities, the University also offers access to LinkedIn learning (which I still have not tried, although I have already linked my account to it) and optional self-enrol courses. In other words, the educational resources offered online are not limited to regular classes and teaching.
I believe all students should make an effort to complement their education with such tools, as they make learning broader and more robust. The workshops have been teaching me other valuable skills, not necessarily directly linked to my LLM, but which I believe are expected of any master's student in 2020.
Information about workshops and other online courses may be found here: https://www.ed.ac.uk/institute-academic-development/postgraduate/taught/courses-events .
