A week in the life of an Online Student
Online training participants are the same as any other college student. They have busy lives and try to fit all of their normal activities into their day... along with taking classes.
Taking classes online allows them to choose convenient times each day to "attend" class. Perhaps they get up early and login to the online classroom, or maybe they stay up after the kids are in bed. Perhaps they use their lunch hour if they have a job, or between errands during the day when the kids are at school. Some days they may do all of these and other days they may not need to be online at all. It is very flexible and they can decide what fits best each day. The student takes responsibility, becomes self-directed as a learner and plans the time needed to complete the coursework.
Most students will be online 5 out of 7 days a week. The "week" in the Pierce online system starts on Thursday and runs through the following Wednesday. This cycle repeats for ten full weeks, regardless of holiday "breaks". All assignments, projects and exams are typically completed in that ten-week calendar - there is no "finals week". Here is a fictitious weekly student schedule for a week:
Day 1: Check in the first day of each week. The workshops are structured week by week to facilitate student interaction and keep everyone moving along to complete coursework by the end of the ten-week session. Read the announcements and review the intended outcomes for the week. Next, review assignments and review instructor's lecture material. Typically, the instructor will provide reading materials to do on or offline.
Day 2: Login again to begin reading lessons/activities and post answers to assigned study questions on the Discussion Board. Typically, the instructor will create an area where the students can ask questions to be answered by the instructor or other students. This is a great resource for answering questions that you cannot find answers to in the readings.
Day 3: Check in today to see if there are any new announcements or redirections from the instructor based on common questions from other students. Next, go to the discussion board and review classmates' responses. Make sure to comment on several other students' responses to the material, seeing where they missed a critical item and helping others clarify their work by asking thoughtful questions. You find discussions are a way to think more deeply about what you've read and studied. You are forced to combine what you're learning from many sources and synthasize thoughtful responses that add to the discussion and enhance understanding of course content by all students in your 'learning community'. This additional processing helps you integrate what you've learned with other information and make remembering and applying that 'knowledge' much easier in the future!
Day 4: This day is full of family activities. No time to check in!
Day 5: A discussion has taken place where the need for more research has been identified. Students were placed into groups and were given tasks as one person undertook the group leader role. A few hours were spent seeking and reading online library journal articles to complement the earlier work. A review of the findings and an annotated bibliography were prepared offline in the word processor and later that day were attached to a posting to the group.
Day 6: Today's work involves reviewing the draft prepared by th group leader and making final comments via group area posts. The second login of the day was to post the second assignment. While logged in, a final review for the week was made of the discussion question replies by classmates relative to several earlier postings. Later in the day a third login revealed that the group leader had completed processing the parts turned in by others in the group and submitted it to the proper discussion forum for the entire class to review. YOur group was the first done!
Day 7: Most of the time online this day was spent reviewing the other group projects that were posted throughout the night. Thoughtful questions were addressed in several cases and all of the comments from the other students led to interesting additions to the week's content. Several of those were going to be very useful in their work. Notes were entered, using the journal tool, regarding the resources the student's had used. Judging from the exchange in the “student lounge” discussion forum thread, everyone felt good about how well they did on the week's assignment. Tomorrow starts a new week!
