Any advice with taking an online class?

Question

Next semester I plan on taking 3 internet classes. I heard some people say its a boat load of work, but its convenient. What has been your experience?

Answer 1

(1) Stay on top of the lectures - Too many students find it easy to avoid the lectures and just watch them later. Next thing you know, it's the day before the test and you have 3 weeks of lectures to watch.

(2) Read the book if there is one - because of the lack of teacher-student interaction, the student has to make sure they understand the material almost entirely by themselves. Read the pertinent parts of the book before each lecture, so listening to the professor is only confirming what you already know.

(3) Don't be afraid to take breaks - We've all done it before. 30 minutes or so into a class, we start getting hungry or thirsty, and we lose our attention on the lecture. The beauty of online classes is that you can pause, go get a snack and a cup of coffee, come back, unpause, and be as attentive as you can be.

(4) Use your TAs or Professors if you can. If you're near campus, go to office hours, if you're doing distance learning, e-mail them. You're paying them to help you, so use them. There's no such thing as a stupid question when someone else is teaching you something.

(5) Don't get caught by distractions - Set aside a time each day that you will sit down and do nothing but watch the class. Don't try to watch the class and have a TV or music on next to you at the same time, and don't open up FreeCell or have any IM programs open at the same time. Any of these things can break your concentration real quick and should be avoided. Act like you're actually in class.

(6) And one final "non-good student" suggestion - If you can, download them and watch them in a video player that can play at 2x speed. It depends on the professor whether or not this can work. Some talk real slow and go over everything in slow detail so speeding it up to 2x is easy to handle. Others talk faster so that even 1.2x speed is hard to keep up, so you shouldn't do it with them. It also depends on how fast you can take in information. Don't watch them so fast that you don't learn anything, you need to find a good balance between how fast you can learn, and how much time you have to spend learning it. Set your own pace.


Online courses are like any other class, really, only you have the added responsibility of keeping up with lectures. If you stay on top of the work and do it all in a timely manner, it's not harder then any other normal class.

Answer 2

Although I haven't taken anything on-line, I had a close friend who has. She was very impressed by most of the classes, and she was able to contact, both by phone and on line her advisors. I would suggest that you make sure that all your classes are from colleges that are accredited, as there are some out there that are diploma mills.