How Can You Catch Up in an Online Course

Here is a practical post from Nancy White. Inspired by her friend Bronwyn Stucky, she deals with the issue of what happens if you fall behind in an online course – how can you catch up? She also suggests that online instructors think about this problem and design “catch up” features into their curriculum. Her list of suggestions includes the following:

• Offer synchronous meetings to reestablish engagement through a focused moment in time.
• Design “phase changes” that are also reentry points, rather than “left behind” points.
• Create or encourage the creation of summaries for both content and process where appropriate.
• Design “Forgiveness” points in time where you tell the learner to ignore everything that came before and just dive in.
• Encourage learning buddies to help each other.
• Don’t go overboard in a designing “self directed learning” recognizing that learners are busy and may need/appreciate more scaffolding than “do your own thing, baby!”
• Contact another learner and ask them to give you a quick update.
• Offer to do a summary – you will learn more than anyone else and catch up at the same time.
• Forgive yourself and let go of what was not done and focus on what can still be done.
• Mark time in your calendar for the course and treat it like a “real appointment.”

Other suggestions? Send them to Nancy who is compiling them for a future post. (GW)

Catch Up Strategies in Online Courses | Full Circle Associates | Nancy White | 11 September 2008

Tagged as: E-learning, Online Courses