How to: Handling Online Classes

I was someone who originally despised online classes because I ran into many of the common problems that many other students faced in taking them.  Through learning good tips and experiences, I actually feel quite the opposite about online courses and have now grown to like them. Like many of my fellow students, some of the common things that I did was put my online classes on the back burner and stress about them when the assignments would build up. Lets face it, time management and organization seem to be the biggest downfalls for students. To avoid this, I developed my own system of organization so that due dates are not missed, and you will have plenty of time to do assignments stress free. I provided some tips that I wish I received when taking my first online courses. Doing these will greatly increase the chances in succeeding and excelling when taking online courses.

-First tip, go out and buy a daily planner if you do not have one already.  It will come in good use when you receive your course syllabus. The beauty of having an online college course is that all of the assignments are already planned for the semester and are shown in your course syllabus. As soon as you get the syllabus for your course, look at it and then mark all of the due dates of your assignments in on your daily planner.  This may be tedious at first but well worth it in the end.  I do this for all of my classes now. It gives you an idea of how much time you have on your assignments and allows you to prioritize what assignments are needed to be done first.
-Second tip, plan certain days of the week and times to dedicate yourself to completing the assignments. This will put you in a routine schedule which will help you avoid procrastination, and missing assignments altogether.  Usually with online classes, teachers make assignments due the same day and time each week which will allow you to easily come up with a routine schedule.  It is best to make this schedule so that you complete your assignments a day or two before its actually due. Which brings me to my third tip.
-Third tip, never do assignments the night that it is due. This is for multiple reasons.  First off, if it is the first time you are looking at the assignment you may not understand how to do it, then you have to email the teacher and it may take days for a response.  This may result in losing points on your assignment or handing it in late.  Second, since the class is online, you may run into technical difficulties where your computer may crash or have a virus etc. In this case you can email the teacher ahead of time and may get an extended deadline to complete your assignment. Lastly, I seem to have better quality of work when I am not stressed out and trying to complete my assignments last minute.

These are just a few tips of how I organize and utilize time management for my online classes. This technique may not be useful to everyone, but I know it seems to be the strategy for many students who are online class veterans.