As I am about to leave campus for spring break, the news we see daily is fast and furious—the invasion of Ukraine, increasing inflation, supply chain difficulties, our country divided politically along many fracture lines, structural racism and more. 

Where can we find current resources to help our students make sense of contemporary events, particularly as those events relate to the material in our courses?

After all, one of the best ways to get students to see the inherent value in the subjects we teach is to show them how our courses relate to the world as it is today. Newspapers are great sources, but too often are written without a scholarly context and may be behind paywalls, making linking to those articles relatively difficult. In the past few years, however, several good online resources have emerged that are explicitly open educational resources (OER) as well as both scholarly and timely, making these sites excellent for furthering students’ understanding as the semester—and the world—unfolds.

The two most useful sites I've found are The Conversation and Aeon. 

The Conversation

According to its website, The Conversation is “a nonprofit, independent news organization dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of experts for the public good. We publish trustworthy and informative articles written by academic experts for the general public and edited by our team of journalists.” The description continues,

On this website (and through distribution of our articles to thousands of news outlets worldwide), you’ll find explanatory journalism on the events, discoveries and issues that matter today. Our articles share researchers’ expertise in policy, science, health, economics, education, history, ethics and most every subject studied in colleges and universities. Some articles offer practical advice grounded in research, while others simply provide authoritative answers to questions that sparked our curiosity.

The Conversation publishes articles very quickly, and those articles tend to be relatively short and written with vocabulary accessible to college students. I am writing this article on March 17, one day after President Zelenskyy addressed Congress, and already there’s a detailed assessment of his speech on the site, written by a political communications scholar. A quick look at the site shows over ten articles on Ukraine published within the past ten days, with foci as disparate as the history of Russian aggression against Ukraine and Putin’s Orwellian doublespeak, written by a historian of Ukraine and a professor of philosophy, respectively. 

In addition to timely coverage of events in Ukraine, recent articles also look at the relative merits of St. Brigid versus St. Patrick in forming Irish identity, a sociological assessment of the problem long-Covid sufferers may face and the use of artificial intelligence in mapping psychedelic experiences in the brain and its promise for new psychiatric treatments.

Aeon

Aeon has a different slant. Its focus is creating pieces which go deeper and are more timeless than those found in The Conversation. According to their website, “Since 2012, Aeon has established itself as a unique digital magazine, publishing some of the most profound and provocative thinking on the web. We ask the big questions and find the freshest, most original answers provided by leading thinkers on science, philosophy, society and the arts.” 

Aeon’s work includes essays—long-form explorations of deep issues, written by serious and creative thinkers—and a mix of curated short documentaries and original Aeon video productions.

While thought provoking and eminently useful, the material here is more sophisticated and takes a longer view. The essays and videos here, all OER, are perhaps best used as a springboard for class discussion rather than something students can navigate on their own. In terms of contemporary issues, Aeon features a 2,500-word essay on national honor and strategy in Russian history, particularly as it pertains to Ukraine.  

Economics is a frequent topic at this site, and there’s a 3,800-word piece on the post-war economy and the unlikelihood of its return. The video selections are intriguing and often timely, e.g., a March 7, 2022, 25-minute video features the experience of a black gay man who joined the London police.

While I often use The Conversation articles as announcement board posts to add more contemporary context to a particular module, and leave it for students to parse that on their own, I find that Aeon articles and videos require more explanation and lend themselves to deeper discussion. I usually incorporate material from Aeon into supplemental readings at the start of the semester and embed class discussions about them as we go. These articles often take the place of material from academic journals in my courses, as they are easier to find, embed and understand and the quality is equivalent to that of a journal article. 

Other sites to try

There are a number of other sites that are scholarly and open educational resources, albeit they don’t publish as frequently and are not as wide-ranging as the two discussed above. 

JSTOR Daily is “an online publication that contextualizes current events with scholarship. Drawing on the richness of JSTOR’s digital library of academic journals, books, images, primary sources, research reports and other material, JSTOR Daily stories provide background—historical, scientific, literary, political, and otherwise—for understanding our world. All...stories contain links to free, publicly accessible research on JSTOR.”   

Currently on tap at JSTOR Daily is a bibliography on Ukraine and Russia, with live and viewable links to the articles and book chapters referenced. There’s a quick read on the socialist origins of International Women’s Day. And continuing the theme of women is a piece on the HBO series The Gilded Age and women’s philanthropic ventures in the last part of the nineteenth century. One intriguing feature of material from JSTOR Daily is that each piece does include links to other documents, in particular, primary sources, although there are secondary sources links as well, which provide detailed evidence for the material included in the essay and which can be further explored by students. 

The Public Domain Review is a fascinating site which publishes a monthly online journal featuring material that is now in the public domain. As the website notes, it is “dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas—focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions.” This site has material for all disciplines. One of my favorite recent essays from here is “The Many Lives of Medieval Wound Man” which traces the history of a particular medical illustration through its many permutations from the medieval period in southern Germany into 17th century England. It is suited for the sciences, for literature, for religion, for philosophy and for history as the essay touches on all these aspects of the illustration.

Since the nature of this site is bringing to light material in the public domain—and hence, published before 1926—much of the material here, while scholarly and interesting, does not deal with contemporary issues in the news now. Some of the material, however, frames contemporary problems in an historical light. For instance, there is a remarkable piece on the photographic legacy of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921.

One final site provides outstanding infographics, five published every week, often about events in the news: Visual Capitalist. Although the site is not technically OER since it doesn’t provide a Creative Commons license, the site does allow free use of its infographics as long as no content is changed, attribution is provided to the site and there’s a link back to Visual Capitalist. The graphics are almost always stunning and allow access to information in an intriguing and easy-to-understand format.

In the past month, several of the infographics pertained to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including “A Recent History of US Sanctions Against Russia,” “Map Explainer: Key Facts about Ukraine” and “A Visual Guide to Europe’s Member States.” In addition to timely material, infographics here can support a wide variety of disciplines. To give you a flavor of what’s available, here are some titles from the site: “The World’s Most Influential Values In One Graphic,” “Mapped: The Most Common Illicit Drugs Around the World,” “The Richest People in the World to the Industrial Revolution” and “The Clean Energy Employment Shift Through 2030.”

While these resources can certainly be used as we instruct in any modality, I find that posting resources like these help me better connect with students and help students connect better with the material in my online courses. I find it easier in on-campus courses to naturally speak with students about connections to current events, where I need to be more intentional in online courses to provide those connections. 

My hope is that the material at these websites will provide you with more quality resources with which to engage your students both on the fly and as you are planning future courses. If you have found other sites like these, I’d love to hear about them at  murphk@fascc.org.