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The number of college majors available to undergraduates doesn’t compare to the abundance of careers one can pursue. Most undergraduate programs are supposed to provide students with a foundation to pursue any number of professional or academic goals. Taylor Yamanaka enrolled at the University of Arizona intending to study business. However, as a lifelong culinary arts enthusiast, he planned on starting and managing a restaurant as a chef.
The major seemed fitting: a business program would prepare its graduates to become entrepreneurs among other roles in the private sector. After starting coursework, however, Yamanaka didn’t see the relevance in what he was learning to his goals: “the main classes I took were dealing with Excel, and that didn’t light up my passion.”
At the time, the University of Arizona was launching an innovative new program in Food Studies, so he switched his major to Food Studies and Philosophy. Unfortunately, Food Studies also fell short of expectations. The program’s resources and support were limited to only two professors, as in the case with many niche subjects. The course material wasn’t strong preparation for starting a restaurant either. “A lot of it was focused on food justice, food insecurity and problems facing the food system,” Yamanaka said. “I gained a greater appreciation for those issues, but it wasn’t exactly where I wanted to end up.”
College may not have prepared Yamanaka for his professional goals, but he developed a new passion over his four years on campus: coffee. “I discovered… the nuance and depth that combining coffee beans and water [creates]. It’s an amazing experience to see the spectrum that’s possible.”
Pursuing his newfound passion, the best career preparation turned out to be available online. He took online courses in coffee preparation and extraction theory before attending a five-day course in coffee machine repair at the International Barista and Coffee Academy in Arizona. Now, Yamanaka has a new position at a tech company focused on luxury coffee machine servicing and repair in San Diego. “I knew that I thrive when working with my hands,” he added.
A bachelor’s degree’s structure and requirements are major limitations to reaching one’s learning goals for those with niche interests. Online learning can be much more versatile, allowing learners to explore any variety of passions.
One benefit of traditional universities compared to most online learning platforms is the connections to people that universities provide. Taking online courses does not allow for building relationships with professors or networking with employers. As Yamanaka learned, this makes accessing smaller and unconventional industries difficult. “The biggest barrier [is] getting into the [coffee] industry in the first place,” he stated.
A transformative addition to the online learning environment is Jinso, a network and learning platform for scholars. It is a learning and researching community for all interests. Jinso users can explore their niche interests, contribute to research output in any field, and get noticed by academics and employers. It provides the networking and mentorship opportunity online learners were missing.
GitHub is a popular platform used by computer scientists to manage their collaborative projects, but a similar program does not exist for academic work. There is no standard platform to create work, connect with others, and share work in one place. Most platforms only fall into one or two of these categories.The Jinso collaboration tool is a better way for groups to work on projects. By bringing the entire academic collaboration process onto one tool, it simplifies workflows and communication.The first steps for using the Jinso platform are:
Once a user builds a network, they can create new Groups that consist of their network members. By default, the creator of a group is the admin. The most common Group is a research group, but the platform can manage several other types of academic projects. Platform users can create study groups for sharing course materials or groups of club members for extracurricular work.The admin of the Group has the ability to add new members at any time.
Admins are also responsible for creating Projects within Groups.
A Project for a research group is usually a research paper, but Projects can also be other forms of documents that could benefit from discussion and revisions. Examples include study guides, business plans, articles, and essays. Each Group can have an unlimited number of Projects within it, and all Projects within a Group are shared among the same members.
Once a user builds a network, they can create new Groups that consist of their network members. By default, the creator of a group is the admin. The most common Group is a research group, but the platform can manage several other types of academic projects.
Platform users can create study groups for sharing course materials or groups of club members for extracurricular work.The admin of the Group has the ability to add new members at any time. Admins are also responsible for creating Projects within Groups.
A Project for a research group is usually a research paper, but Projects can also be other forms of documents that could benefit from discussion and revisions. Examples include study guides, business plans, articles, and essays. Each Group can have an unlimited number of Projects within it, and all Projects within a Group are shared among the same members.
When a new Project is created, an initial revision must be shared. This can either be plain text or a PDF.
The Project will be immediately visible to all Group members with the first revision shown. Group members can comment on the revision with questions or feedback, and others can reply to comments.When another revision of the paper has been completed, the Group admin can add a new revision to the same Project.
The revision will become visible above the prior revision, and it will have a new comment box associated with it. Projects make it simple to keep track of a paper’s entire revision history and discussions at each stage.
For each revision, Group admins can also create subtasks. Arrows allow Group members to view all of the different subtasks and comment on them individually. Subtasks allow a paper to be analyzed in unique components. For example, a research paper can have a unique subtask for each of its sections, and collaborators can discuss them all separately in the comment boxes. Jinso is a quicker way to collaborate on long-term projects. It makes it easier to connect, share, and manage the development of ideas and papers. You can create a Jinso account and start using the platform today for your research and academic needs at jinso.io.
The number of college majors available to undergraduates doesn’t compare to the abundance of careers one can pursue. Most undergraduate programs are supposed to provide students with a foundation to pursue any number of professional or academic goals. Taylor Yamanaka enrolled at the University of Arizona intending to study business. However, as a lifelong culinary arts enthusiast, he planned on starting and managing a restaurant as a chef.
The major seemed fitting: a business program would prepare its graduates to become entrepreneurs among other roles in the private sector. After starting coursework, however, Yamanaka didn’t see the relevance in what he was learning to his goals: “the main classes I took were dealing with Excel, and that didn’t light up my passion.”
At the time, the University of Arizona was launching an innovative new program in Food Studies, so he switched his major to Food Studies and Philosophy. Unfortunately, Food Studies also fell short of expectations. The program’s resources and support were limited to only two professors, as in the case with many niche subjects. The course material wasn’t strong preparation for starting a restaurant either. “A lot of it was focused on food justice, food insecurity and problems facing the food system,” Yamanaka said. “I gained a greater appreciation for those issues, but it wasn’t exactly where I wanted to end up.”
College may not have prepared Yamanaka for his professional goals, but he developed a new passion over his four years on campus: coffee. “I discovered… the nuance and depth that combining coffee beans and water [creates]. It’s an amazing experience to see the spectrum that’s possible.”
Pursuing his newfound passion, the best career preparation turned out to be available online. He took online courses in coffee preparation and extraction theory before attending a five-day course in coffee machine repair at the International Barista and Coffee Academy in Arizona. Now, Yamanaka has a new position at a tech company focused on luxury coffee machine servicing and repair in San Diego. “I knew that I thrive when working with my hands,” he added.
A bachelor’s degree’s structure and requirements are major limitations to reaching one’s learning goals for those with niche interests. Online learning can be much more versatile, allowing learners to explore any variety of passions.
One benefit of traditional universities compared to most online learning platforms is the connections to people that universities provide. Taking online courses does not allow for building relationships with professors or networking with employers. As Yamanaka learned, this makes accessing smaller and unconventional industries difficult. “The biggest barrier [is] getting into the [coffee] industry in the first place,” he stated.
A transformative addition to the online learning environment is Jinso, a network and learning platform for scholars. It is a learning and researching community for all interests. Jinso users can explore their niche interests, contribute to research output in any field, and get noticed by academics and employers. It provides the networking and mentorship opportunity online learners were missing.
