The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way universities taught their courses with lectures and seminars moving online. But this change to online learning has bought new challenges to student’s success. In this blog post, you’re going to learn 5 tips to help you master online learning from a student who’s been doing online learning for over a year.
1 Scheduling
At first, I thought this is a very weird tip to offer but I encourage you to master scheduling because it makes online learning a lot easier. Because the main problem with online learning is there are no set times for anything.
In my experience, the readings and the lectures were given ahead of time and the only truly scheduled thing was my psychology statistics. Meaning I had a lot of free time to do the reading and watch the lectures.
This is where scheduling becomes important because if you can’t schedule your time properly. Then you will probably struggle to watch all the lectures, do the readings and do any assignments or coursework that you need to do. Leading to you most probably feeling overwhelmed. We don’t want this.
Scheduling is very important to master for online learning. Active-Class was designed to help with your online learning, thus the learning management system provides you with a dashboard optimised to aid your scheduling needs.
2 Minimising Distractions
I highly recommend the other post on the blog about how to minimise distractions. But to connect it to online learning, the better you are at minimising these distractions the better your online learning experience will be. Because you’ll be able to focus more and you should be able to learn more.
From my experience, I definitely found the fewer distractions I had around me the better I found the online learning. Due to I was able to dive into the topic and get deep into it without a distraction breaking my concentration and pulling me away from the topic.
We’ve all been there when we want to learn something but there are so many distractions, we end up giving up.
You don’t want that for your online learning! For another blog dedicated to this topic see this page.
3 Productivity
Leading on from the last point, with our distractions minimised it should allow us to be more productive and this is just critical for online learning.
As a result, another problem with being at home and doing online learning is we’re at home and it’s all too easy to be distracted and not be productive. But this can catch you out because if you don’t make a productive use of your time. You’ll fall behind, your readings will pile up and your lectures don’t get watched.
In my university year, I’ve seen way too many people panic a few weeks before the exams because they didn’t make a productive use of their time, and now they have hundreds of pages to read.
Don’t do this to yourself!
Overall, master being productive and keeping on top of your online learning so you don’t end up in a panic before the exams!
4 Time Management
I’ve probably touched on this in previous blog posts but time management links to productivity and scheduling. Yet it does deserve its own section because of how important it is.
Not only because it allows you to stay on top of your online learning but because it means you can do other things besides your online learning.
Since we all know if you don’t have fun, relax, have breaks, go out with friends, etc. then this leads to burnout and a decrease in your mental health. We don’t want that!
Therefore, what time management allows you to do is it means you can allocate or think about how much time your online learning will take. Giving you a rough idea how much free time you have.
I made very good use of this because I had an extremely hard rule about my online learning. Fridays and Saturdays are mine. And in all honesty, Wednesdays and Thursdays were mine too. Unless I was doing coursework or assignments.
My time management skills allowed me to understand and be productive on Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays so I could have the rest of the week effectively off.
Of course, your course will have different requirements and your lifestyle will be different to mine. You might want to work different days and different hours.
But the entire point of this section is to inspire you that time management allows you to be flexible and have a life outside of your online learning. Needless to say, it’s important to master.
5 Active-Class
The final thing I recommend you master is Active-Class (link) because this is a great piece of software that allows you to do so much to help your online learning. For example, it helps with scheduling, seeing your timetable and planning around it and it has a lot of other features (more information link).
Whilst I didn’t have access to Active-Class during my studies, I wish I had. It could have saved me a bit of time each week. So I do recommend it. For a nice introductory video, please see this YouTube video.
Conclusion
I don’t think online learning is going anywhere and there are benefits, but there are drawbacks too.
After reading this blog post, I hope you have a better understanding of the things you should master to help your learning.
I wish you the best of luck.
Have a great day!
