Struggling With Online Courses? Here Are Some Tips for Success

Written by Alex Fisher

Thumbnail & Banner Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Online courses can be a great boon for many. Being able to make progress towards your degree from the comfort of your own room can save you a lot of time, money, and stress, especially if such courses are taken in the spring and summer semesters—allowing you to lessen your course load in the academic year while still maintaining the requirements for scholarship renewals and keeping your GPA high.

One thing you might struggle with, however, is the adjustment between in-person lectures and online ones, especially with asynchronous courses or if you were not a student during the COVID-19 pandemic. For a lot of people, the biggest downside to online classes is being surrounded by potential distractions which can break their focus while trying to learn. Fortunately for you, there are a lot of tips and methods which can help to reduce those distractions and bring your focus back to those lectures, slides, and assignments, allowing you to excel in even the most boring of online courses.

The first and most important tip for succeeding with online courses is to set up a dedicated workspace, free of distractions. Depending on your situation this may mean walking to your local library for an afternoon of studying, finding a quiet spot in your house, sitting down in your garden or a nearby park, or whatever else works best for you. The key is to find a space that your brain associates with working, not with relaxing or playing. As outlined in a 2020 article by Jim Kwik on Medium.com, the human brain has a remarkable ability to create certain associations: you learn better in a classroom, you sleep better in your bedroom, and you’ll have better memorization in a familiar study space. So by creating and enforcing a comfortable and accessible environment dedicated to learning and studying, you’ll be training your own brain not to get distracted while you’re there. For an even stronger association, put your phone on silent mode and keep away from social media while you’re in that space, and within even a short amount of time the temptations will fade to the background.

One of the drawbacks of online learning can be the sense of loneliness you might feel, not being able to connect with your peers or see them on a regular basis. While it may be an imperfect solution, trying to set up study groups with your classmates can be very helpful in this regard, and it may also help with your understanding of the material by giving you access to others’ insights. If they haven’t already, you could ask your professor to set up a discussion tab on your course’s Brightspace page, or send out an email to everyone in the class inviting them to join you in a study group. While it will depend on the willingness of your peers to participate in these social activities, having regular discussions or weekly Zoom calls can help your understanding of the course, lead to meeting new friends, and beat that sense of loneliness which may set in during the spring and summer months.

When it comes to online courses, and especially asynchronous ones, some professors may choose to release a full week’s worth or more of content, all at once. This can often be overwhelming, even more so if you’re taking multiple online courses at the same time, and may cause you to struggle with completing the work because you feel as though you don’t know where to start. There is a rather simple method that can be used to alleviate this problem, however: by breaking the work up into several smaller tasks, to be accomplished over a reasonable timeframe, you’ll make it far more manageable and greatly reduce that sense of being overwhelmed. For example, if you’re given five lectures and three assignments to finish in a two week timeframe, you might choose to watch one lecture per day, then complete one assignment per day. Suddenly an overwhelming amount of work has been reduced to something which can be completed piecemeal over the course of eight days, comfortably within that two week deadline. To make this method even stronger, you can also use to-do lists and reward yourself each day when you accomplish the tasks you set out to finish. Crossing items off of a to-do list each day will fill you with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment at the progress you’re making, and rewarding yourself with little treats or activities you enjoy harkens back to the idea of building positive associations in your brain: when you finish your work, you’ll be entitled to a small reward for staying on task.

Building off of the idea of a to-do list is one final tip for doing well in online courses: creating an organizational plan. It can be easy to lose track of deadlines, especially when managing multiple courses and not having reminders from your professor. To help with this, entering assignment deadlines into your calendar—either physical or digital—and setting reminders on your phone can keep you on track with little to no mental effort. Just set it up at the start of the term, or each week if all the important dates aren’t stated right off the bat, and say goodbye to memorizing when everything is due. The last piece of an organizational plan—and once again connecting to the idea of creating mental associations and having a designated study space—is to have a comfortable routine. By having a set time each day when you watch lectures or work on assignments, it will be easy to fall into a routine and it’ll feel far less like forcing yourself to get work done.

Taking an online course does not need to be a struggle, even for those who work better in a more familiar classroom environment. There are a number of strategies to help you succeed and spend less time to earn a better grade, most of them being fairly easy to get started with. From finding a dedicated spot to work, to staying organized and dividing your work into manageable chunks, or even reaching out to your peers, nearly all of the techniques outlined in this article will only take a few minutes to implement, quickly developing into habits which could help you be a more effective student.

Melissa Alvarez Del Angel