Best Practices for Online Students

Digital resilience isn’t about being a tech expert. It’s about what you do when something goes wrong … because something always does.

Resilient online learners:

• Try a different approach when one isn’t working, rather than stopping
• Practice a growth mindset: they see effort, not fixed ability, as the driver of success
  • 25 ways to develop a growth mindset
  • 15 ways to build a growth mindset
• Use feedback from instructors, grades, and their own experience to adjust and improve
• Reflect on what’s helping and what’s getting in the way, so they can shift course

Try this: After finishing a major assignment, take five minutes to write down one thing that worked well and one thing you’d change. 

Having reliable access to the tools and technology your courses require is foundational, and it’s worth taking seriously before the semester starts.

Successful online learners:

• Know what tools and technology their courses require and confirm access before day one
• Use available tools actively to support their learning, not just to submit assignments
• Know how to organize and manage their digital materials
  • 4 tips for organizing your eLearning documents 
  • Diigo social bookmarking tool for saving and annotating online resources 
  • Google Drive cloud storage and document sharing
  • Zotero — reference management for research and papers

Try this: Before your first week, locate the tech support resources available to you through your campus. Save that contact information somewhere you can find it fast.

Online learners who ask for help – early and often – do better. The challenge is that online learning can make it feel like asking for help is harder than it should be.

Successful online learners:

• Know where to find help before they need it
• Ask for help when they’re stuck, rather than waiting it out
• Talk through what they’re learning with peers, classmates, or study partners
• Use campus resources: tutoring centers, writing centers, librarians, advisors
  • First-generation college student support 

Try this: Find and bookmark your campus’s online help desk, tutoring service, and advisor contact page in the first week. You don’t have to use them yet … just know where they are.

This is the skill set that holds everything else together. Self-regulated learners plan their work, monitor their own progress, and adjust when things aren’t going well.

Successful online learners:

• Organize their time and make a plan before starting course activities
  • Time management tools for students 
• Take notes actively and strategically
  • The not-so-humble outline: note-taking strategies
  • How psychology research can help you study effectively
• Draw diagrams, make concept maps, or create visuals to understand complex material
• Test themselves by writing questions and trying to answer them before reviewing
• Connect new material to things they already know
• Practice material repeatedly until they know it well
• Write down what they don’t understand so they can come back to it
• Check their progress, deadlines, and grades on a regular schedule
• Review their work after submitting – not to second-guess, but to learn
• Set up a physical study environment that supports focus
  • 7 ways to organize your study space for success

Blogging and reflection tools (for learners who process by writing or sharing):

• Google Sites
• Obsidian
• Edublogs
• WordPress

Research on self-regulated learning:

• Do students know enough smart learning strategies?
• Shared strategies document 

Students who do well online tend to have a realistic picture of what it actually requires before the semester starts. When expectations and reality diverge, that gap is often where struggle begins.

Successful online learners:

• Focus on learning and progress, not just grades or comparison with others
• Connect coursework to their real lives and interests; it’s easier to stay motivated when the material means something to you
• Understand that flexibility in online learning comes with a tradeoff: you’re responsible for the structure
• Recognize that online learning has a social dimension, and look for ways to connect with classmates and instructors, not just complete work
• Attribute their outcomes to effort, not to fixed ideas about how smart they are

Try this: Before your first week, write down two or three honest expectations you have about what online learning will be like. Revisit them at the end of the first month. What matched? What surprised you?