Challenges of Online Learning — Online Class survival guide 

It won’t be so simple again in the post-COVID era. Awaken at the crack of dawn, grumble at your alarm pretty much, then prepare and attend class. Then we had to travel and add computers into the combination.

Online classes: This stuff is growing in popularity for years. There are free ones, and you shall find cheap ones as well. Also, there are costly ones taught to you by guys in their garages, and there are even full-blown university courses that you can take online, albeit you do not attend that University.

In 2020 & 2021, remote teaching and online classes became the only option for most people going back to school. Well, online classes are often very convenient in some ways. They can also trip you up and make your life more difficult, along with other changes and factors. There are some things that I think you should know, like how to bring about the changes or get accustomed to it, so that you can prepare to be as successful as possible in whatever online class you are going to require.

Today we’re getting to share five (5) tips for helping you steel yourself against and obtain the foremost out of online classes. In a sense, you can also call them the five (5) challenges of remote teaching and online classes.

I feel this is often helpful for anybody going back to high school, college, or University during a formal setting online, but this could even be helpful for anybody taking a web class. Independently so whichever camp you’re in, let’s get started.

Challenge Number 1: Asynchronous Teaching

The first trick is to treat these internet-run classes a bit like they’re actual in-person classes. See, the matter with online classes is that they’re usually taught asynchronously!

The instructor or the teacher prepares materials ahead of time, and then you do it differently. Now, this might be changing a bit this year since many schools are going to online-only education. You might perhaps see many classes talk through video conferencing apps like ZOOM and HANGOUTS or Google Meet. I still think it’s likely you’re going to have a lot of asynchronous learning time.

You’re going to receive tons of independent reading assignments and homework assignments, and you will try to do them on your own. Everything is independent if you’re taking a separate online class like some Samurai Guitarist class on music theory. The problem with this asynchronous, independent, and distanced nature of online courses is that it becomes straightforward to fall behind if you are not self-disciplined. In-person classes are face-to-face, and that they happen on a schedule. That schedule makes it heaps easier to remain on top of your reading and everything of your homework assignments. Additionally, it gives your day a touch of structure.

With online classes, a significant portion of that structure is lacking. I know this from experience back when I was in University; I took several online classes amongst my in-person classes. Those were pharmaceutical science classes, and I bet you can guess which classes I fell behind from everything I took.

Do whatever you can to treat your online classes just like they’re actual classes in terms of schedule — In terms of where you do them, in terms of everything.

Maybe your teachers already have you covered. They’re going to make you set up a desk. They’re going to do all the classes on ZOOM, but if they aren’t, do it for yourself. My favorite tip is to line up a fanatical workspace for yourself wherever you reside to tidy up the things.

Additionally, using some online whiteboard and real-time bi-lateral visual collaboration tools may come in handy in such situations to make things synchronous. Give Dojoit.com a try — love to live it.

Challenge Number 2: Loss of episodic memory formation

Secondly, create recurring events on your calendar for all of your classes. Then at the beginning of each week, look ahead at what you’ve got on your calendar. Then build a schedule for yourself to make plans for homework and any other events in the gaps between those regular classes. Lastly, it’s a brilliant idea to keep up your routines, so have a morning routine that helps you get ready for the day. Also, build some momentum, so you start your online classes feeling fresh.

Tip number two (2) here is to get serious about your calendar, and your to-do list mainly means adding new events to your calendar and new tasks to your to-do list the moment you get them.

See, it is already hard enough to keep the jumble of events and tasks straight in your head during standard times. Still, when everything moves online, you lose one key component to what scientists call episodic memory formation. It is the process that your brain goes through to consolidate and encode new memories, and that is location. Connection to location is a massive part of this process as your memories get inextricably tied to where you were when you experienced them. That’s why people often ask questions like where were you when the fire nation attacked (A TV show thing. Ref: The Last Airbender)! I was sitting in front of my PC in my living room, probably eating some junk food.

We also know that two pieces of information in the brain get linked in a two-way relationship. Let me give you an example to ease this a bit. I can ask you what Goku’s power level is (again, a TV show thing. Ref: Dragon Ball Z), and you’re probably going to tell me that “it’s over 9000!” I can also ask you to name me something over 9 000, and you’re likely to say Goku’s power level. That’s why jeopardy works, and I would submit that this also applies to your recollection of what happens as you go through a day of classes.

If you’re used to going from classroom to classroom, then moving everything online means that you’re now losing out on a whole bunch of unique location information that would have likely helped you recall events and due dates assigned to you, which means that it’s now more important than ever that you’re getting this data into a system. An external system that you trust, and then you can review that system to make sure nothing slips through the crack at the end of the day.

Preserve side notes about calendars keeping time zones in mind as well. Now, suppose you’re in middle school, high school, or college, and your physical school building are just a few miles down the road; well, then maybe this doesn’t matter to you at all, but if you’re a university student who’s maybe out of state and for the first time doing school in a different time zone from where your University and your teacher is, then you want to make sure that you have the correct time zones on your calendar and with google calendar and pretty much every other calendar software out there you can choose the time zone of any event you’re creating. Then it’ll automatically translate the time zone when you’re looking at your entire calendar.

Suppose you’re trying to schedule events with a study group or like a virtual project group, and you’re trying to figure out when everyone can meet. In that case, you can also use tools like doodle, which lets everyone input the times they’re available, and it’ll automatically do the time zone translation for you. Also, for real-time multi-lateral visual collaboration, Dojoit is a good hit.

Challenge Number 3: Untidiness

At point three (3), we will talk about being organized digitally. Maybe you think you’re already perfectly organized, perhaps you’re a minimalism master, but we got to talk about this because with in-person classes, there are often a lot of paper handouts creating an emphasis on the physical organization in this beautiful analog world, but when classes move online everything becomes organized digitally. So you have to learn how to manage all of your handouts on your computer tidily.

Don’t be that guy who saves everything to the desktop creating a giant jumbled mess of files, EXEs, game reserves, and whatever else. Create a folder in your file management system for every class you’re taking, and then create a subfolder for any project you have within those classes with more than one file associated with it.

Additionally, within your note-taking system, you want to have a notebook or board for each class whether you’re writing out notes with a pen on paper or you’re typing them into an online whiteboard, you want to have a specific place where everything for each class gets organized and grouped. Here comes Dojoit with its glorified in-built note-taking and content creation platform, all in one place.

Challenge Number 4: Monotony

Number four (4) is my favorite tip here. It would help if you found a way to break up your day.

One of the things that I missed most from my university days was the little time gaps between my classes. My University is on this vast campus. It was like 150 acres or something land. It meant that I would sometimes have to power walk or walk to make it across campus, to make it in time for the next class, but those mad dashes across campus were an excellent way to break up the day.

They also gave me a way to get outside and get a little bit of exercise, and I remember being bummed when I got my first internship and a couple of my early jobs and realized that all of my work was done from one tiny little cubicle. So sometimes, I would find ways to get away from that cubicle and break up my day a little bit by going for a 10-minute walk downtown or something.

If you’re about to start a full suite of online classes, then the place you will be doing it is probably not a lot different from that cubicle I had. So you should find a way to break up your day as well. It could be as simple as every once in a while getting up from your desk, stretching a bit, and going for a walk, moving around a bit, just getting a little bit of a change of scenery. If you have a decent amount of room in your home, you could also make this a bit further. Maybe switch locations during the day going from your desk to the kitchen table back to the desk. Even if you’re not working with much space, just getting up and giving yourself some of these breaks will help make your learning time “not feel like this big giant amorphous blob of time that never ends.”

Challenge Number 5: Isolation

The final tip approaches. Get yourself a virtual study group.

Potentially one of the worst things about learning online is the isolation, at least the physical isolation. Instead of sitting in a classroom with 20 other students and a teacher, you’re at home alone. Studying in isolation cannot be that praiseworthy all the time, now can it! Nor would it lead to anything notably marvelous.

One way to mitigate this, at least somewhat, is to form a virtual study group. You can do this by asking a few of your classmates to meet up with you on Dojoit boards or ZOOM, just a few times a week, so you can study together or review assignments or make fart jokes.

You can also do what I like to call work calls. Maybe your friends live in different states, and essentially you could hop on Skype because you might still be living in the dark age and have no idea about how awesome Dojoit is! I implied that you could get on a call where nobody would talk, but you would each be on the line with the other person knowing that they were getting their work done. Participating on the same Dojoit board is an excellent productivity hack, and this is something that you want to do.

There is a site called FOCUSMATE that is tailor-made for this purpose of silent Skype group call. You might find it helpful if you are one of those less-talkative people.

If you’d like to test out everything you’ve learned in this blog post today, improve your habits to help you study more effectively and be more successful in your classes. We may do that in three (3) different ways –

1. Strengthening your internal self-discipline.

2. Assisting that self-discipline with innovative external systems that help keep you on track.

3. Improving those habits over time with regular reflection.

If you find this blog post helpful, please support us by sharing this with your friends and family on the social platforms you use. If you haven’t subscribed to Dojoit.com already, you can subscribe right away. Give the free plan a go.