Let’s face it, studying can be a pain on the netherregions of the human body that normally only come into contact with comfy chair cushions. The AU library provides the handy service of sending books out to you as a distance student, which can make life much simpler and convenient for the time-constrained. I love that service, but it’s not always enough. Listed below are a few other websites that you, the keen researcher or studier, might want to take a look at.

MIT OpenCourseware (http://ocw.mit.edu/): A publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that provides course material and lecture notes from courses of all sorts, in a free and open forum accessible without registration to any person with web access. (http://ocw.mit.edu/)

Thomson Learning (http://www.thomson.com/learning/learning.jsp): provides a commercial resource for the purchase of course materials, but, more interestingly, it also provides book companion sites (http://www.wadsworth.com/pubco/pub_companion.html) which have study guides, quizzes, lists of resources, and much more, that can augment your course materials. Many of the AU course texts can be found here.

Courseworkbank (http://www.courseworkbank.co.uk/): is the UK’s largest free coursework and essay database. Mainly dedicated to those 18 and under, it can still provide an excellent quick reference for research or study.

The University of Victoria’s Hypertext Writer’s Guide (http://web.uvic.ca/wguide/): provides an excellent resource for essay and assignment writers of all levels; it is “an introduction to the process of writing and to the study of literature.” It provides information on types of essays, grammar, documentation, literary terms, summaries, and much more.