Survive and Thrive in Online Classes

6 Top Tips to Make Online Learning More Effective

By Amy Barr, Wizened Sage of Online Education at The Lukeion Project

2020 was one for the history books. Those same books will, no doubt, mention the sudden demand for online education world-wide when teachers and students alike found themselves in unfamiliar territory. Educators sought to apply in-person teaching skills to an online world while students likewise struggled to adapt when every educational expectation changed instantly. Whole school systems stopped functioning. It was a mess for many people.

The unfortunate academic side-effects of the 2020 debacle will be inspiration for many volumes, no doubt. So why not get started here? 

Not all online education is the same. We fear people will begin to avoid online classes due to negative encounters with inexperienced educators. We recently had a parent comment that she loved how our classes didn’t consist of videos of the instructor rambling and drinking coffee like her child’s other classes. There are some fantastic tools and techniques to keep students engaged online. Not every program or educator is aware of these tools! 

Some students have few choices but to stay online—good, bad, or meh—for the foreseeable future. They may be faced with a future of not-so-great online classes combined with lots of not-so-great prospects for doing anything differently. So, as a wizened sage of online education, I offer 6 tips for making the best of any online education.

1. Be the boss of you.

*SOME* educational environments promote poor time management skills and poor executive function by offering too many reminders, too many try-it-again chances, and too few expectations that a student can succeed. When students move online, their instructor also moves to digital communication. Published due dates on syllabi, notes on screen, or weekly emails now require that little extra step. Students need to check what’s up next and how to do it because nobody plans to come to your desk to remind you. Your educator doesn’t have time to text you (in case you forgot to look at email) or call you to make sure you read your handouts. All of that is your job now.

If you, dear student, struggle with this sort of thing now you will also struggle in college, career, and life. Promote yourself to being your own boss. Make yourself do things you’d rather not do (study vs. social media) when you’d rather not do them (first thing in the morning rather than “later when I feel like it”) without multiple reminders and do-overs. You are in charge of you!1

2. Schedule ardently

Everyone should have time in their schedule to do pleasant things! All of us should stop and smell the roses (or whatever). One of the best ways of safeguarding the opportunity for doing what we enjoy, is to also safeguard the necessity to get work done when it should be done. I’ve written plenty about setting up schedules and sticking to them. The benefit of scheduling yourself is so you get things done so you also get to enjoy the fruit of your labor with some glorious unstructured down time! Give two students the exact same number of tasks: The stressed depressed student tends to be the one who never schedules anything for himself and who always just waits for the right mood to hit. 

3. Education is on a computer or not by a computer.

If you have an actual human teaching you online, remember that human being is … human. Communicate! Ask questions! Tell him or her you’ll be late (not just sleeping through class). Let him or her know you could really use a second review of that difficult topic covered last week. Say please and thanks. Let him or her know you enjoyed an especially helpful session or that you are thankful for the feedback that got you through a tricky assignment. When that very human educator forgets to post a link or open a quiz on time, be nice. Send a respectful email. Get to know that educator a little bit so he or she knows you, too, are working hard to have a good educational experience.

4. Accountability: you need some!

It never hurts to let somebody else know you have big projects coming up that will take extra time. It never hurts to let them know you have set the goal to study a certain amount each day, or you plan to dedicate time to reading during breakfast, or you have set the goal of completing X, Y, and Z before lunch every Friday. Whatever your goals are, share them with somebody else as an accountability partner. This can make goals (small and large) seem both more do-able and celebrate-able. When you have moved to online education, you can really benefit from setting more structure in place. Finding somebody besides the very-distant educator to share the struggles over goals, projects, or tricky tasks, may help you to stay on task. Plus they are great to help you celebrate success when it pays off.

5. Never assume there’s less work just because it is online.

We have lots of new-to-online people signing up this year. That’s great! Welcome! But we know some misconstrue a one-hour-per-week class as a one-hour-per-week time commitment. Online classes normally have a better economy of time usage. There will be a time to communicate information followed by the expectation that students practice and perform that information outside of live “class.” An online Latin 1 class will take about as much time as a brick-and-mortar Latin class (5 to 7 hours a week) even though nobody is making you sit at your desk at the same time each day. Expect to be about as busy in an online AP class as you would if you were attending in person. So take care you don’t overschedule yourself or your student! 

6. Learn how to learn. 

Most come through their educational years knowing how to be taught but they may not necessarily know how to learn. Figuring out what kind of trick questions your English teacher loves on pop-quizzes is a matter of learning how to be taught. Guessing how to “game” the system so your never work too hard in a class is agility at being taught not the ability to learn. 

Memorize a stack of biology concepts or Spanish vocabulary today and remember those words in a week. Sort through a half dozen philosophers and be able to explain them to a friend on Saturday. Master some geometry formulae but put them to real use when you build something for yourself. Decide you like to read through an impressive piece of literature and actually accomplish this goal. All of this is where the real stuff happens. 

Knowing how to learn is not a skill reserved for especially smart people or especially rich people or for those with tons of spare time on their hands. Master a few techniques to help motivate yourself when you’d rather nap. Come up with a method and reward system to finish 3 short writing projects, a discussion question, and a vocabulary quiz before dinner.

Learning how to learn will make any situation, online or in-person, better. Learning how to learn is about self-management, understanding how (and when) your brain functions best, and getting yourself to do the tough stuff when you really don’t want to do it. Know yourself. Some people are slow readers, some people don’t like math, some have a hard time paying attention to others talk. Everyone has something to figure out about themselves as they learn how to learn. It takes time. Don’t wait to be taught. Learn how to learn.

Handy Academic Essentials Tools

(From the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion)

By Amy Barr, Lively Classical Guide at The Lukeion Project

Let me tell you about a new thing we'll be doing in June! While finalizing the schedule for the next academic year, our clever Lukeion instructors were standing around the online watercooler recently. After covering an assortment of important topics like how many students hate raisins but would happily jump out of an airplane (at least according to their answers in class polls), we turned to the topic of how to best equip high school students for life. Nope, no weird social engineering goals here, but we did observe that most of our students could use lot more support and instruction using certain academic tools.

When my three now-adult-kids were prepping to start college after admissions formalities were finished, they were required to take placement tests in various academic skills. Depending on results, they might be expected to take remedial courses or complete a few tutorials to bring them up to academic speed in time to begin their first semester. Thankfully they placed well, but I learned a few things about what we can do to better prep our college-bound students.

Some placement subjects are predictable. Students are tested on competency in writing, English, and grammar skills and even typing speed. They are examined to determine proper placement in math and other academic topics that are commonly lacking for new college students. They are also tested on academic essential apps., namely MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

These program/app placements are not just a push for students to buy them (at most universities, students are given access to these either for free or at a huge discount). Instead, these apps are the primary means of communication a student will need at the college level. If they don’t have these app skills, they will need to develop them quickly and early.

First and foremost, students must carefully format every document that is ever submitted at the college level. If a student turns in research work in the humanities, they’ll need to know how for format in MLA style sheet most of the time. If they work in the sciences or other fields, again, they’ll be expected to format all their work carefully according to assigned style sheets. Most writing projects at The Lukeion Project require extremely specific formatting to get students accustomed to methods they must employ when creating written projects.

On average, 80% of even our brightest college bound students are clueless about using good formatting methodology in MS Word. We can tell you stories for hours about how students have variously (and hilariously) misinterpreted how to perform basic formatting tasks in assignments. Often parents -- who often have no formal training in Word -- "helped" students make those formatting mistakes. Don't even get me started about how "double spaced" has gone off the rails more than once! Suffice it to say, it is never too early for a student to learn how to use this app effectively. A student needs to use Word as early in middle school as possible.

Second, most degree programs today correctly require students to take at least one semester of public speaking. We agree! The art of persuasive presentation and communication is important enough to us that we offer two semesters of Rhetoric at The Lukeion Project. No matter what you plan to do in life, the need for being a persuasive and clear communicator is inevitable. One can say they “dislike public speaking” all they please but clear communication is an absolute must for most. Learn early how to present information clearly and effectively with MS PowerPoint.

Third, the need to organize information or data is fundamental in every field of study. MS Excel provides a highly flexible way to organize information and even compute data. Most young adults could really benefit from the ability to track monthly expenses or school bills in Excel, but most young college students can also use that same program to organize research notes, keep track of a study group’s progress in a semester project, or follow a series of data sets in their biology program, chemistry class, or statistics course. It can be a very handy tool indeed and reasonably intuitive once you get started.

This summer through The Lukeion Project, students can register for a “boot camp” in each of these three programs/apps. Naturally all three of them will be a benefit to use right away in high school, but certainly these apps will be absolutely necessary in upper-level high school and college. Students need to have their own access to these apps on home devices to participate in the courses, but each boot camp will take a student through many of the most important rules and methods of using these tools now and in the future. Adults who need these same tools are also invited to join us. We won't blow your cover!

We decided to add a fourth Academic Essential Bootcamp to the summer workshop list: The fundamentals of College Writing is a four session class designed to give the fastest foundation to collegiate writing requirements available. If a student somehow never had time for our Skillful Scribbler (late middle school/early high school) or our semester courses Composition/ResearchWriting (11^th or 12^th grade), this little short workshop will get a student started for his or her first college tasks without (hopefully) needing a trip to the writing lab right away. Most underestimate how much more writing preparation is needed to achieve calm success in college assignments. This is a great last-minute patch to help any late-high school through early college student.