10 New Years Resolutions for Online Students, by Jamie Littlefield, includes practical advice that can help anyone who works from home ever (and who doesn’t?) as well as online students and faculty. Her advice is particularly important for new students who, lacking the traditional classroom and campus, may not know the steps to take to be successful.
Although e-learning has grown and become more technologically sophisticated, much of Jamie’s advice echos what was in a course I developed in 2001 as part of a team at EDS. The course, How to Be an Online Learner, was developed as the first online course and a prerequisite for other courses for the Laborers-AGC Education and Training Fund, a partnership between the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) and The Associated General Contractors of America (AGC).
We thought it was important to get students online and get them accustomed to being online students before taking a “real” course. Of course, it assumed that students could get online and use a browser, which fewer people could do then than in 2010. The course covered how to be a successful student and how it is different to be a student online than in the classroom, offering guidance about motivation, time management, setting up a good study environment, and online behavior and interaction. It also covered how to use the tools in the Laborers-AGC online course environment.
The next course was on fitting and cleaning a respirator and it was a “blended” course since there was supervised practice. I can still remember the issues as well as the consequences of not fitting or cleaning a respirator well. Which goes to show that the best way to learn something is to teach it. I’ll add #11 to Jamie’s list: Seek opportunities to teach others to reinforce your own learning.