6 Top Tips to Make Online Learning More Effective
By Amy Barr, Wizened Sage of Online Education at The Lukeion Project
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.
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