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Tips & Techniques
Planning Your Schedule
An online course allows you more flexibility and convenience as far as choosing the time you want to work on your course, but you will still be required to meet deadlines. Don’t plan on missing a week of an online course for vacation or a business trip and think you can just catch up on it later. Many instructors have at least weekly deadlines.
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Keep in close contact with your advisor as
you plan your schedule each semester. It is important to
remember that online courses are very time intensive. Plan on
spending as much time in your online course as you would spend sitting
in a classroom listening to a lecture and doing your
homework outside of the classroom. The time you spend in an
online class is typically the same as a traditional class; you just
spend your time differently. You no longer spend time sitting in
a classroom listening to a lecture; instead, you are reading and
researching on your own. On average, you should plan on about
nine hours per week for each of your online classes. If you are
taking a class in a summer session, keep in mind that you will cover
the same amount of material as you would in a sixteen-week course, but
the timeframe is more condensed. In essence, one day of material
in a four-week summer course will cover the same material covered in
one week of a sixteen-week course.
