Lecture
Welcome back! Did you get through the entire Syllabus and all of Chapter 1? Did you get most of your Objective Guide filled out? In the least, I hope that you know what the Five Fundamental Concepts are. I’m glad that you made it back so that we can get started. (I’ve been waiting a while…)
Since I spent my Introductory Page of this module explaining what an Introductory Page was, I’m going to use this first page of the Lecture to give you an overview of what we’ll be covering in this Lecture.
We’re going to start off by discussing what it will take to do well in an on-line course. (That’s the fourth Objective; you should have gotten the first three by now.) Then we’ll move on to getting the foundations of our learning set up by discussing the Five Fundamental Concepts in more detail. Get your Objective Guides and pens/pencils ready as we go through.
Doing Well in an Online Course
How do you feel you’re doing so far? Take a moment to think about your own study skills, how well you do in your classes, and how well that represents your true learning or capacity to learn. Do your grades represent what you know? Oftentimes, we as instructors hear students say that they aren’t working up to their potential. This doesn’t happen because students lack the ability; rather, they lack the know-how. When you look at the difference between someone who is successful and someone who isn’t, it’s often not an issue of ability. I’m sure that you all have friends who you believe are smarter than you, but who have never made it far in school.
Here, I’m going to tell you how to do well in this course. It’s really no secret. I compiled a list of seven characteristics of a successful online student in the table below. But before you read it, I want you to define for yourself what success is going to be. Is it an A, a B, or a C.? Is success based solely on your academic goal (grade) for the course, or do you want to learn something specific. Do you have learning goals? Maybe you want to learn if you really will be able to buy a combustion engine (gasoline run) Corvette in 2030 with your first million given our current oil supplies (and the cost of gasoline). Think about it for a minute or two. What will it mean at the end of the semester for you to feel that you have successfully completed this course?
Now, let’s go onto that table.
Table: Skills of a successful online student. Some of these were adapted from: Illinois Online Network (ION). Online Education Resources Pedagogy & Learning: Student Profile. University of Illinois. 2010. Web. Nov. 12, 2011. <http://www.ion.uillinois.edu/resources/tutorials/pedagogy/StudentProfile.asp>