You may be taking an online course because you have a busy schedule that makes attending classes hard. However, it's important to start your online classes knowing that these cover the same material as a sixteen-week course does in an eight-week period. This means that you'll have double the amount of work each week. Set your schedule now for when you will do the assigned readings, participate in discussions, and work on your assignments. (See more on time management in the section below.)
Expect that technology will fail at some point. Your Internet may go down; your computer may malfunction. Submit work early whenever you can. Have a backup plan of where you'll go to use the Internet or another computer when problems occur.
Become familiar with everything provided in the course. Read the syllabus carefully, check the announcements each time you log in (or have them sent to you automatically by setting a notification), read all the postings on the discussion board, read the directions for all assignments carefully. Instructors know that we won't be able to tell you how to do things verbally, so we've included needed information in the course.
Expect that you will have a personal emergency at some point. You will become ill, or you'll need to work overtime, or a family member will need you, and you just won't have time for your schoolwork. The best defense is to have work done early each week. If you have been a procrastinator in the past, now is a good time to break that habit. It's smart to know what the lateness penalties are on the syllabus since instructors vary in their approach to accepting late work.
Follow any class guides or suggestions from your instructor in your Canvas class. Read more on how to organize yourself and your time for online classes in the Time Management section below.
Read more on Online Etiquette below.
In face-to-face classes, instructors can see when students are puzzled and so know when to cover a point in a different way. That doesn't happen in online classes. If your question is about the course material. the discussions are usually the right place to ask about these online classes will usually have an Instructor's Office or similar area for questions also. Use these when something in the course is not clear. Use email when the question concerns a personal matter such as a question about grades since teachers cannot address grades for one student in any area where other students can view the exchange.
For most people, one of the hardest parts of being an online student is time management. The structure of class meetings is gone; the lectures get added to all your readings and homework to do "on your own time." While all students may struggle with this, students coming out of a highly structured environment like high school can find this particularly difficult.
You may find that you underestimate how long things will take, or that you underestimate how important it is to do all the readings and lectures before completing certain assignments. All of this can lead to frustration; maybe you don't understand the assignment, maybe you aren't sure why you didn't do well on a test or paper. Additionally, if you are used to having the "safety net" of teachers verbally explaining assignments and reminding you of due dates, it can be difficult to adjust to needing to find and keep track of that information on your own.
It will be important to start working on finding strategies that work for you to keep track of your classes and manage your time. So, the following are some tips to help you get started.
Use a calendar or planner
You may find you prefer handwriting everything out at the beginning of the week or that you need something that will ding a reminder at you, but find some sort of calendar, planner, or to-do app that works for you.
Some options: a basic paper/notebook-style planner, Apple or Google Calendar on your phone/computer, To-do list apps (for example: todoist, Any.do)
Use the Modules page in Canvas (or whatever method your classes are using) to view everything for that week. Write down everything you have to do along with any due dates. Don't forget readings and lectures in your list. Double-check due dates as you write things down.
Break down larger projects into smaller parts, and put the smaller parts in the calendar/planner as well as the major due dates.
For example: If you have a research paper due for your Sociology class, you will have to brainstorm your topic, find research, read the research, organize your thoughts/pre-write, write your paper, and then revise your paper before turning it in. So, make sure to include all those steps on your calendar/planner and to give yourself enough time for each of the steps.
If you need reminders, set up a calendar that can automatically ping, email, or otherwise notify you on the day you need to start something.
Notice, that said the day you need to start not when it's actually due. There are few things more stressful than getting the alert at 10 pm the night before a large project is due and realizing you haven't started it yet.
Plan out your week. Decide on Sundays or Mondays when you have time to do things that week and block off that time in advance. Spending an extra hour at the beginning of each week will save you a large headache in the long run.
Make a plan for each online class in the order in which you will complete the work. You will likely have to watch or read the lectures before you complete any assignments. Figure out what is due when and then plan backward for completing the preliminary work like lectures and reading and then the work of the assignment.
Pay attention to how long things take you to complete and adjust accordingly next week. If you find that your Biology lectures are taking twice as long as expected but your English lectures are taking half the time, make sure to keep that in mind for future weeks when you are planning out your week. You may even want to note how long things are taking you.
Read through all assignments at least twice. Often, when students don't meet the requirements for an assignment, they find they missed a line or sometimes an entire paragraph when they read through the instructions. We're all used to skimming a lot of information quickly thanks to the internet and online spaces, but in classroom and workplace settings, we need to remember to slow down and read carefully.
Write down any important requirements, guidelines, or things you will need to remember when working on the assignment.
Double and triple-check due dates.
When you've completed the assignment, read through the assignment again. Make sure that you didn't miss anything the first time or forget to include something that was required once you got working on it.
When you turn something in, get in a habit of exiting out of the assignment and going back in to see that it posted. This step takes only a few extra seconds but can save you a whole bunch of problems in the end.
In online environments, we are more limited in presenting tone and intent and building interpersonal relations than we are in in-person interactions. Therefore, we must all make an effort to communicate in ways that are supportive and foster an environment of learning (even when disagreeing).
The following guidelines are helpful for all online environments but particularly for online classes:
Remember the human behind the screen. In person, we rarely will immediately yell at someone or feel the need to condescend to them. But in online interactions, it can be hard to remember that there's a human being, with emotions and things going on in their own lives and their own experiences, on the other side of every communication. We don't get any real-time feedback if we offend someone or hurt their feelings like we would in person. So, it can help to check yourself in a few ways:
1. How would you feel if this message was sent to you?
2. Would you send this message to someone you cared about?
Be professional. Treat your online classes as you would in any professional environment. If you haven't worked in professional environments (or have primarily worked in jobs where management has not created professional environments. I'm looking at you, retail jobs that I had back when I was in college), then imagine that you are working in the career that you hope to work in someday. Imagine that your classmates are your new co-workers and that you want to make a good impression.
Over time, most of us will develop a "professional persona" or a version of ourselves that is just a little more polite and professional than our "at-home selves". You may already do this at work, or you might do this with specific family members like a grandparent, aunt, or uncle. Bring that professional persona into your online class environments—use that as a guide for how you communicate with your professors and your classmates.
Calm down before responding. If you find yourself feeling upset or emotional from something that has happened, like a grade you received, a discussion board post you read from another student, etc. Step away from the computer. Allow yourself time to calm down; go do something else and come back to it. If you want to make sure you don't forget some of your thoughts on the matter, draft an email in Notepad or Word and save it for later. Then, once you are calm reread that email and rewrite it so that you are not escalating the situation. You can't control how other people behave, but you can control your own responses. And quite often, it's a misunderstanding that you can easily resolve with a calm response.
Be a goldfish. Or have a short memory for both your own personal failings and for others' failings.
I'm stealing this line from a show called Ted Lasso. In this show, Ted Lasso is a very positive and good-humored professional soccer coach. In one of the episodes, a player makes a mistake big during the game. Then because he's frustrated and beating himself up about it, the player goes on to make mistake after mistake. Ted gives that player the advice to be a goldfish because goldfish have short memories. The player needs to let go of the mistakes so that he doesn't continue to make more mistakes.
In classes, this can happen when there's a miscommunication or when a student is feeling frustrated about making mistakes with an assignment or a bad grade. In online classes, emails can be sent and assignments can be submitted in the middle of the night with the click of a button. It's easy to move a little too quickly in response, only to make more mistakes or further a miscommunication. If you feel upset: slow down, step away from the computer, and come back to it in the morning.
In other words, try to let go of your mistakes. Forgive your classmates when they make mistakes in discussion boards, and forgive yourself when you make them. We all do it—whether it's online or in-person, we'll inevitably say something or write something that if we read later we realize was wrong or makes us feel unintelligent or comes off far ruder than we intended. I have definitely been awake, lying in bed at night, replaying embarrassing and ridiculous things I've said in classes, both when I was a student and now as a professor!
It's good to let these things go for yourself just for your own well-being, but for online communications, it's also important to let things go so that we can continue to have professional relationships with one another.
Don't dox (yourself or others). For anyone unfamiliar with this word, doxxing is when you reveal personal information about someone online. It's often used in online spaces where people use anonymous user names, but even in spaces with our real name, do not attempt to find people in real life or share that information with others. And for yourself, always be careful about how much you share. I'll be honest. I'm terrible at this. I'm an oversharer at my very core, but it's good practice to be careful nonetheless because while it would be amazing if everyone always had good intentions, we all know that's not always the case.
And above all, try to be kind. It never hurts to treat others with a little extra kindness and compassion, but it can hurt a lot when we do the opposite.
"Success in an Online Class" by Sarah Karlis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.