Like most college students, I wanted to be done with my core classes and dive right into the classes required for my major. In order to do so, it would require me to take some classes over the summer. I chose to take online classes at a local college in order to complete six credits worth of cores so that I could take the classes I wanted to take. I thought taking the classes would be either a piece of cake or be really hard. As it turns out, online classes are what you make them and you get what you put into them.
The online classes I took were designed to fit a person's schedule and required that I participate x amount of times in a discussion board and that I complete certain assignments. When I first began my classes, I was so prepared and I wanted to get into the habit of getting my work done early and having it done. I would try to get up a bit earlier in the morning so that I could post and maybe do some of my homework or some of the reading. However, that plan quickly began to fail. I found it hard to motivate myself to just answer the question on the discussion board or to start the assignment early not because the questions presented were super hard, but because I was simply not motivated. Taking an online class is not the same as taking a class where you have to be physically present. I would find myself at my laptop just staring at the screen and then wandering to another browser. All of my work would get done, eventually, but it was very hard to actually convince myself that I needed to get the work done.
These statements make me sound lazy, I'm sure, but online classes were a struggle for me. I was not constantly engaging with other students or a teacher in person. There was no face-to-face interaction and nothing to hold my attention. I still maintained above average grades in my classes, despite my lack of determination in the class, but I began to notice the digression in my enthusiasm for the class as soon as I logged on one day only to open a new tab to read a book online. I had to discipline myself to get my work done, not just because I needed to maintain my good grades but for myself. I needed to learn how to really discipline myself and I did. As cliche as it may be, I wrote myself a schedule and tried my best to stick to it and get my assignments done way before the deadline.
Online classes provide awesome opportunities for a person to fit their education into their schedule. They are flexible and beneficial to those who maybe cannot make an hour commute every day, to those who have two kids in school and want to go back to school, to those who want to expand their knowledge but just don't have a lot of time to do so, etc. I think that online learning is great and while I struggled with it, I learned a great deal beyond Civil War Developments or how to calculate the z score. I learned that motivating yourself is hard and is not always easy, but the end results are what matter.
