Getting Engaged with Your Online Courses

With online courses, you will have to be a self-starter since you will not have a classroom to be in or a specific time for classes to meet.  As an online student, you are definitely not taking the easy route.  You have accepted a lot of the responsibility for your own studies.  This does not mean that you have to lose out on the rewarding experience of working with your classmates or with a professor but you will have to work a little bit harder at it.  You may have to initiate and maintain contact with those you chose to engage with including your professor, you can come up with your own extracurricular activities that enhance your learning experience and you can encourage others to become and remain engaged.

Taking the Initiative

In some online classes, there are message boards with a required number of posts. A way to stay engaged is to post considerably more often than is required.  The message boards will most likely be reviewed by your professor so the more you post, the more feedback you receive.  The more feedback you receive, the better prepared you will be for any writing assignments.

You can also initiate e-mail correspondence with your professor bouncing off ideas for research outside of the class that can build on what you are learning inside the class.  Including your classmates in these e-mails could be a great way to get their feedback and ideas as well.  Starting a regular e-mail correspondence with your fellow classmates will also be helpful if someone has a question on an assignment and you can’t get a hold of the professor.  It will foster an environment of cooperative learning and growth which you may not have had otherwise. 

Doing research on topics that complement what you are currently studying may give you a new perspective on the topic at hand that other students do not have.  You are enriching the class by enriching yourself and are that much better prepared for your chosen field by the time you graduate. 

Unexpected benefits

You may also connect well with other students and form friendships that would have otherwise been missed had you not engaged in the class as much.  This can be more common than you would think.  Since you are in the same course as these other students, chances are that you share a common interest and may end up in other courses together in which case, you will already have a class of students who want to be engaged with the course.  Ultimately, the more you engage with the course, the more you will get out of it and it may come with other benefits as well.

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