Although you may want to sign up for as many classes as possible, taking only one or two in the beginning is the best way to go. That way you’ll be able get a feel for how many hours you need to dedicate to your classes each week. By starting slow, you’ll learn to pace yourself without being overwhelmed as well as what other life commitments will just have to go in order for your online learning experience to be a success.

It’s easier to add additional courses the next semester than it is to drop or fail out of one now. Remember, online college classes are just as challenging and time consuming as the classes at a campus university. It definitely won’t be a walk in the park.

(Source: Education.org)

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If you’ve been putting off a huge end-of-semester assignment because you don’t know where you’ll find the time to fit it in your busy schedule, it helps to start small. Begin working for just ten minutes on the daunting task. Almost any task,  no matter how unpleasant, or anxiety provoking, can be tolerated for a short amount of time.

When you are having difficulty sitting down to work, set yourself the small but significant goal of working for just ten minutes on the project. After you’ve fulfilled that promise to yourself, you are free to either continue working or to stop.

Further Tips for the Tolerable Ten

1. If you haven’t been working at all, start by doing anything and stop after ten minutes. In other words, the less you’ve been doing the lower your expectations should be at first. If you put in your ten minutes, and you have succeeded. One of the main benefits of the tolerable ten is to start rebuilding your trust in yourself.
2. If you have been working fairly consistently, try using the tolerable ten for the hardest tasks, whether starting a section of rough draft writing, or contacting the advisor you’ve been avoiding.
3. Even on a day that is full of duties unrelated to your main academic goal, try to squeeze in a tolerable ten. Before you go to bed at night, check whether you’ve logged in ten, if not, do it then. A commitment to consistency will keep your conscious and unconscious mind connected with your project.
4. Reward yourself, at least mentally, for completing your daily ten. Focus on process rather than product. It is not whether the words you’ve just written were brilliant, it is that you sat down and did what you said you would do. Small, concrete rewards are ideal: ten minutes with the newspaper, a phone call to a friend, a relaxing bath, a scoop of ice cream, wearing your favorite shirt, a cup of cappuccino.
5. Precede time-sapping activities (such responding to email) with a tolerable ten.

(source: Successful Academic)

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Being — or becoming — a good writer isn’t just important for school assignments or a career in journalism. Writing is a critical skill for virtually any profession, and even experienced writers know they can always improve their work. It’s a quest that should never end, because the more you write, the better your writing can become.

1. Make sure your sentences are clear and statements accurate. Could your professor or boss misunderstand your words, or miss your point? Are you certain your facts and resources are correct? If you include hyperlinks in electronic documents, did you check to assure they work?
2. Read what you’ve written. Read it again. Ask someone else to read it. Could you have improved anything? Are there errors in sentence structure, grammar or spelling? Team up with another student or colleague to do regular constructive critiques of your work. It’s a great way for each of you to continually improve your writing skills.
3. Whether you’ve always loved words, or hated to look them up, online dictionaries and thesauri make using the right words simpler, easier and more precise.
4. Class work may require detailed annotations and footnotes. Business correspondence should illustrate your message concisely, especially when preparing presentations. Short sentences and paragraphs are best for online, where readers tend to scan the information.
5. Take a newswriting course. It will teach you how to quickly and succinctly communicate information and how the inverted pyramid can grab your reader’s attention more quickly.  If newswriting isn’t offered at your school, study it on your own using other resources.
6. Don’t use jargon. Keep acronyms to a minimum and consider whether you really need to use one at all. Are there too many prepositional phrases, generally rife with commas? Write for clarity and understanding — don’t make your reader guess.
7. Do a comma search. Commas stop the reader, which is what you generally intend them to do. But overuse can result in long sentences that are hard to read and understand. Look at your sentence again. Should you break it into two?
8. Search again – for repetitive words and phrases that aren’t necessary. Sometimes, however, a particular word might be the best — or only — way to communicate clearly and accurately. And sometimes repetition is used for alliteration or to make a certain point.
9. Make it interesting. No matter what you write — from business letters to speeches, from research papers to marketing brochures — it should be compelling. Create a mesmerizing lead sentence or statement. Use examples and anecdotes — adapting these to the reader’s business or industry, if possible.

10. No idioms or clichés, for Pete’s sake! Hunt them down and kill them. But beware: clichés are sneaky — in fact, this sentence is starting to sound cliché-like. While it’s fun to discover the origins of slang, idioms and clichés, set a higher standard for your writing. What do you really want to convey? Using clichés is less accurate, and your work will appear unpolished and unsophisticated.

- By Online Learning Tips Staff

Successful online students develop the skill to converse with their instructor. They learn to ask their instructors questions and answering questions posed by instructors. Instructors ask questions to cause critical thinking to occur in their students in order to help them develop a better understanding of course materials and resources. It is necessary to avoid the view that these questions are busy work.

The ability to create thought provoking questions are essential to success. These types of questions lead to a deeper understanding, along with gaining new knowledge about the material being questioned. Communication through questioning is an important skill to learn.

(source: suite101.com)

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