Learning to Learn Online / Online Study Skills
Do you have what it takes to learn online? Have you squeaked through
previous courses by cramming the night before an exam or staying up all
night writing a paper? Will that approach work for an online course?
Knowing how you learn and the learning strategies you have successfully
used in the past will prepare you in an online environment. You may find
learning online enjoyable, overwhelming, or both. Online courses tend
to require students to be more responsible for their own learning. Being
responsible for your own learning includes knowing how to study, monitoring
what you're doing and how well it is working for you, and knowing when
to change your approach or ask for help. Strategies that you've used in
previous classes may not provide you with the same results in an online
course. You may need to try some different approaches to learning in order
to be successful.
Before examining different learning strategies or changing how you approach
learning, it is useful to look at how you prefer to learn. This module
will help you identify your learning preferences and provide some suggestions
on how to learn successfully in an online course.
To discover your learning preferences, click here.
To learn how to orient yourself to an unfamiliar online course, click
here.
All students need to use several strategies to be successful learners.
In this section, we suggest several different strategies that will help
you be a successful online student.
Time Management
If procrastination is your middle name, click
here to learn about time management strategies:
To find out how much time you have to study, fill out our study-time
assessment exercise.
Motivation and Goal Setting
If you have difficulties getting or staying motivated, click
here to learn how to set personal learning goals to motivate yourself.
Complete our personal learning goals
exercise, where we walk you through the steps to set and assess a
personal learning goal.
Reading Strategies
Reading course materials can require different reading strategies than
reading a novel or the newspaper. Click here
to learn strategies for actively reading academic and technical texts.
Review Strategies
Does studying mean only reading your notes over and over? How do you
know when to take notes, especially if your course materials include textbooks,
video clips, and websites? How can you take notes that will help you participate
in discussions? Click here to learn some
useful review strategies for an online course.
Online Communication
Most communication in an online course is written. Click
here for some suggestions on how to communicate clearly using e-mail
and discussions.
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