Nine Ways to Improve Your Online Coursework

Even though online courses are different from face-to-face courses, the same basic academic skills are required in order to succeed. You should make sure that you understand each assignment, maintain an organized approach to your work, manage your time well, and communicate with your professor no matter what format the course is offered in. But there are a few unique ways you can make the quality of your online coursework even better. Try out some of the suggestions below if you want your coursework to go from good to great!

1. Take a Test: Many Internet Readiness Tests are available online to help you determine what your academic strengths and weaknesses are. Once you know important things like how well you respond to deadlines, or how much interaction you need with the course instructor, you will have a better idea how to approach your online work. The University of North Carolina offers an excellent free Online Learning Readiness Questionnaire that calculates your readiness for online work and then offers suggestions for action based on the results.
2. Make Space for Yourself: Traditional college classrooms are blank slates, without posters, bulletin boards, or other distractions. In fact, I’ve taught in some rooms that could be mistaken for the bleak common rooms in bad prison movies. But you will most likely work on your online course at home, and if it’s anything at all like my home work space, there can be many distractions: family members come and go, pets block your computer screen for attention, the phone rings, and the TV or your cozy bed beckons you. But it’s important to clear a space in which you can work without distraction in order to succeed in your coursework. Establish some ground rules for family members to create “me time” when you can do study and complete your coursework.
3. Create a Routine: Face-to-face classes have set meeting times. But many online courses are asynchronous, which means that there are no set meeting times and you can participate in your course on your own schedule. As great as that sounds, it can be a trap, tempting you to put off your work until it is too late. If you set up a regular schedule, as if you are attending a scheduled class, you will be more likely to stay on track.
4. Schedule Extra Time: Online courses often require more time commitment than traditional face-to-face courses.This means that you need to budget more time than you might think in order to complete all your work. Keep this in mind when you create your routine.
5. Watch Your Words: The style of your contributions to online course discussions should be different from the way you communicate with your friends online. In order to remain clear and avoid miscommunications, spell out all words and avoid abbreviations like the acronyms you use when you text message. This will raise the quality of your work. Also keep in mind the basic rules of Netiquette to help you maintain a professional tone and language at all times.
6. Develop Your Tech Skills: Though your instructor can provide limited assistance, it is your responsibility to know how your course Learning Management System (LMS) works, how to troubleshoot any computer problems that might occur, and how to maximize your participation through tools outside the LMS, such as your mobile phone. Be familiar with these before the course starts, and pay attention to what your fellow students are doing and learn about new tools from them. You can also contact your college’s tech support team for assistance.
7. Know Your Resources: The course syllabus is not the only resource you should familiarize yourself with before the course begins. Explore the course learning platform or Learning Management System. Click around! See what you can find and what different tools are available for your use. For example, if your course is offered through Blackboard, find the chat room, journal, discussion board and other applications. Your instructor may also have uploaded content to the site, in addition to the syllabus, including reading assignments, videos, wikis, etc. Knowing where these are before the course starts will prevent time loss due to confusion.
8. Participate Every Day: But don’t participate just to participate. Make your contributions meaningful. One study argues that too many contributions can actually hurt students and that “increased levels of interaction, as measured by time spent, actually decrease course completion rates.” Instead of submitting many short comments, submit fewer but more substantive responses. As a professor, I award higher scores to more thorough comments, over the brief throw-away comments from students who are just trying to prove they’re participating.
9. Back Up and Save Your Work: While plenty of websites offer tips on how to back up and save your work, two good ways to make sure your work doesn’t get eaten by your computer is to save your work to an external hard drive or use an online remote filing service like Mozy or Google Docs.

In the end, success in an online courses depends on effort you put into it, just like any other course. If you have questions about online courses, contact the student support services offered by your school, for help with technical issues, tutorials on how to use online course management systems, and other concerns. No matter what you do, remember that effort usually pays off!