The following tutorials and information are mandatory, though no assignment is required to be submitted. The skills developed in these tutorials will be used throughout the nursing program.
Evaluating the resources you use
One of the major challenges today, with the sheer amount of information available at your fingertips via the Web, is determining the reliability of the information presented. It can be quite difficult to determine the quality, authenticity, and authority of the information you encounter. However, there are a number of tools and skills at your disposal that help to determine if the information you find is trustworthy and of academic quality. Watch the Evaluating Websites tutorial to learn more about how to determine the quality of information found on the Web. Review the tutorial: “Evaluating Websites,” located at http://tutorials.gcumedia.com/evaluatingWebTutorial/vp02.swf
What makes a resource scholarly?
Throughout your courses at GCU you will be encouraged to use scholarly resources to support your assignments and discussion questions. But what is a scholarly source? Simply put, a scholarly source is a resource or research created, published, and or written by scholars and professionals in a specific discipline. In addition, a scholarly source should have undergone rigorous fact checking and peer review to ensure the research and information presented is of strong academic quality.
The bulk of scholarly resources can be found in books and academic and/or professional journals. A large majority of these are research based. A scholar or professional may publish articles in other resources, such as in magazines, newspapers, and even Web sites and blogs. However, these sources do not go through the rigorous fact checking that is expected from scholarly journals. This rigorous fact checking is called peer review. When a scholar or professional submits their article to be published the journal will send the