FINAL FINAL BLOG

Hello World!!

For the final blog, I thought I would wrap this final project up. It took quite a while to go through the articles and review them all but I feel I learned a lot on the subject matter. It ended up being a 7 page report which I'm not sure if that's long or short but I felt it was solid in content. Anyway I thought the best way to show this was to show you my final class discussion.

Research Question:
How has Academic Progress Rate (APR) affected Division 1 NCAA men’s basketball teams?

Research Topic:
I chose to research the Academic Progress Rate because as you recruit student athletes you learn how important this is to the success of your program. Working as Director of Basketball Operations for Men’s Basketball at Idaho State University, it is important for me to know what factors go into this programs and stay on top of calculating our teams APR to remain successful and keep our scholarships.

Search Strategies:
In the beginning of my search, I tended to be more general in my statements (ie. APR, NCAA APR), but then once I found a few articles, I tried to narrow the search. I used truncation, quotation marks, proximity searching, and advance searches through Google. I also think that as I searched and read through articles, it leads you to other ideas to search (ie. ESPN Basketball Rankings, Idaho State University). I found that in my search there was a lot of credible information from organizations and institutions, but there are also many blogs that highlight personal opinions about the subject as well.

Findings:
I learned a lot from this final project. It is interesting to research articles that came out during the inception of the Academic Progress Programs, versus articles that are out more recently with more than four years of data to compare. A lot of the early articles had a negative slant about the program because many top programs were failing as far as academics. But, with more data to compare over the years, schools are focusing on academics and sports such as football, basketball, and baseball have all shown improvement. There is a lot of work that goes into this program from the institutions to the NCAA.

In closing, as I sit here waiting for my flight home in Milwaukee Wisconsin Ive grown a greater appreciation of the Internet and its many uses. We can do so many things, which makes me wonder why can't my flight ever be on time!!!

Take Care, and as always....
Stay Classy
CVF

IDT Final

Hello World,

Hope all of you are well, and not scrambling to finish the final project. Mine is going surprisingly well. I chose google as my search engine for NCAA APR (Academic Progress Rate) affecting college basketball and more specifically men's basketball, due to the fact that my question was based around athletics and less about education. I played around with some others but google is by far the best engine out their. As for the the first search, I started looking for things dealing with the NCAA APR. Everyone uses the NCAA letting when dealing with them but my first problem was APR. When searching APR brought up articles with the month of April (APR) in it. So this was a disaster. After I spelled it out it became more clear. Another issue was Annual Percentage Rate kept coming up. But after i spelled things out we were in business. Anyway, hope to post more this week with the final touches.

Stay Classy!
CVF

IDT 516 Update

Hello World,

Hope everyone is well. Id like to say that I'm rested after a 5 day trip to Hawaii but I'm actually more tired and not that tan :(. College basketball coaches get no sleep and no tan when it comes to Hawaii and November. Anyway unfortunately I don't have a lot to report because I plan on doing a bunch of work on my final project this week. Ive been searching different search engines such as ERIC and Google although I am trying to use different sites such as Zuula to check differences.

Anyway, I will post later in the week with more specifics. Hopefully the turkey wont make me too sleepy to do some homework on Thursday.

Stay Classy,
CVF

IDT 516 (Week 3)

Hello world, happy Thursday to you all. Not to make anyone jealous but my wife and I are less than 48 hours away from a 5 day vacation to Hawaii. God bless Internet classes, only with them can I sit on the Waikiki beach and work on my database search. So far, so good. Haven't had a lot of issues thus far. I'm sure as I get deeper into it the questions will come. Anyway, hope everyone in well.

Aloha,
CVF

IDT 516 Final Project (Week 2)

Hello World!

Well this is the second post tonight, for some reason the first one didn't load properly. For this week I've really been just waiting for feedback. I have chosen option 3 for my final project. For my subject for my online database search I have chosen the APR (Academic Progress Rating) which is used by the NCAA to govern schools athletic teams. I'm not sure this is the best topic for this search but its something that I would like to know more about so I felt it would be a good topic to search. Hopefully next week I will have more to report on the overall process.

Stay Classy!
CVF

Hello World!!!

Hi Everyone,

This is my first official blog! So hopefully they will get better with time. I have chosen for my final project to choose Option 3 (Conduct and Online Database Search). I feel for my career that this would be the best fit for me. I would love to learn how to better research using databases. Hopefully, with this blog all of you will be able to track my progress through this journey.

Later,
CVF