5 Online Sources to Help You With Biology Homework

Biology is a mandatory subject for high-school students and college students majoring in natural science. We often hear from students, who have interest in biology or have difficulties in this subject at school that they lack good online biology resources. Are you one of them? Then, this article is for you. We have found five the most valuable online sources to help you with any biology assignment. We will tell you about all of them, talk about their usage, advantages and disadvantages.

Khan Academy

Who can use Khan Academy? Everyone: from elementary school students and their parents to professors, who are planning classes.

How can Khan Academy help me? Video lessons, reading materials on a wide range of biology topics (and beyond), practice tests.

What is good and what is bad about it? Difficult topics are explained “for dummies”, platform is super nice and extremely user-friendly. You can see how you progress in your studies, plan your schedule. Honestly, we could not notice significant drawbacks of this source, it is the best in what it provides.

Talking about our case, there are many opportunities for biology students. You missed the class and you don’t understand a topic from your textbook? Preparing for the presentation? Have an exam soon? You are a student interested in biology and want to study at home? Khan Academy will help you. An interface of the platform is pretty user friendly – just go to Science&Engineering and then choose Biology.

So what exactly you can learn at Khan Academy? There are plenty of blocks available! Just to give you understanding – below you can see a list of few courses that you could find at Khan Academy:

• Intro to biology
• ­Chemistry of life
• Water, acids and bases
• Properties of carbon
• Macromolecules
• Energy and enzymes
• Structure of a cell
• Photosynthesis
• Developmental biology
• Evolution and the tree of life
• Ecology
• Human biology
• Plant biology

There are several lessons in each course. Every lesson in its turn consists of few sub-topics.  Topics are explained in videos, however reading materials are also provided. Besides, there are practice questions that you can answer after lessons and unit test that includes questions across all topics. We have tested the source and the content seems to be really valuable, interactive and engaging.

BioEd Online

Who can use BioEd Online? Teachers, high-school and college students.

How BioEd Online could help me? You can find educational videos, read supplementary materials, read about recent news and hot topics in biology.

What is good and what is bad about it? News section with hot topics and urgent discoveries is engaging. Videos and materials are also helpful, however, they cover limited number of topics. As for the website itself, the design looks a little outdated, however it is well-structured.

The next source we want to talk about is BioEd Online – «Science Teacher Resources from Baylor College of Medicine». In fact, BioEd Online is created for teachers to help them make their classes better. However, we think that this website could be used by students as well. As you see, there are different sections on the website. Videos could help you to remember topics you studied at class and to prepare for the test. Library with different reading materials can be valuable if you are working on your research paper, group project or individual essay. News section is useful if you are looking for great presentation topics.

Directory of Open Access Journals

Who can use DOAJ? College students, PhD students.

How DOAJ could help me? Look for articles in biology for any assignment.

What is good and what is bad about it? There are 3 million articles that you can find, the majority of them are on biology and medicine. The search process is clear and easy. As for weak points of DOAJ, we could mention that this search engine is for academic articles search only .

Practice shows that students often don’t know how to search information they need for their assignments. There are a lot of databases and academic search engines that you could use in your studies. We want to present you one of them – Directory of open access journals. This is probably the best free source to look for biology related information.

In DOAJ base you can search by journal or articles. Besides, it is possible to choose a subject, for example, if you are looking for research ideas in particular area. You can filter it by publisher as well as choose language: articles are mostly in English, however there is possibility to find them in Spanish, Portuguese, French and others.

There are various subjects that this source could be valuable for. We would like to list few of them:

• General Biology
• Ecology
• Medicine]
• Biotechnology
• Zoology
• Botany
• Animal culture
• Evolution
• Reproduction
• Biochemistry

And many many more!

JSTOR

Who can use JSTOR ? College students, PhD students.

How JSTOR could help me? Find articles, books, reviews, research reports on biology.

What is good and what is bad about it? There is a wide choice of resources by type and by area. JSTOR has just one weak point: the source is not free. However, the access to JSTOR is usually provided by university libraries and you can easily log in through your library account. If you don’t have access to college or local library, you can buy it on the website: monthly plan is 20$, yearly plan is 179$.

JSTOR is really similar to the previous source – one more search engine for researches! JSTOR positions itself as a “digital library”. Comparing to DOAJ, where you can find only academic articles, JSTOR provides books, reviews, research reports as well.

EdX

The last source we want to tell you about is one of the best educational platforms existing nowadays. It hosts online courses from top universities from all over the world. By visiting this website you are able to study courses of Harvard, M.I.T, Oxford…FOR FREE!

Who can use edX? School students, college students.

How edX could help me? You can upgrade your knowledge in any area, find different new sources, that you could use for your homework and practice for your tests.

What is good and what is bad about it? edX is amazingly structured, you can see the level of course, how much time you will need to study all the topics, the syllabus – just like at in-class courses.

EdX has courses from 130 partners, most of them are higher educational institutions, but among them you can also find non-profit organizations and corporations. As it reports, there are 14 million students and around 2000 courses.

You can find 143 biology courses at edX, such as:

• Tropical coastal ecosystems (University of Queensland)
• Essential Human Biology: Cells and Tissues (University of ADELAIDE)
• Viruses & How to Beat Them: Cells, Immunity, Vaccines (IsraelX)
• Anatomy: Gastrointestinal, Reproductive and Endocrine Systems (Univeristy of Michingan)
• Principles of Biochemistry (Harvard University)
• Molecular Biology (M.I.T)
• Analyze your Genome! (University of San Diego)