Success Strategies for Online Students | The Sloan Consortium

Success Strategies for Online Students

August 23, 2010 – 4:27pm | by Sloan-C

Date: 

October 27, 2010 – 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Important Guidance Tips to Address Student Concerns

Students have a variety of unique issues they face in the online environment. Many are either too intimidated to ask, or are unaware of what to ask instructors about how to be successful. This webinar will address how students and online professors can both benefit from guidance provided in the online classroom.

The following topics will be addressed:

1. Navigation Issues
2. Terminology Issues
3. Academic Honesty
4. Goal Setting
5. Time Management
6. Motivation
7. Increasing Retention
8. Learning Preferences
9. Writing and Formatting Skills
10. Test Preparation Techniques

Although these are common topics addressed in many online courses, many instructors may be inadvertently omitting some important guidelines necessary for their students’ optimal success. In this webinar, the focus will be on providing satisfactory answers to questions students really have,  alleviating their concerns. The end result of learning these techniques will be more successful online students as well as more effective online professors. 

Price:

Individual Members (Free)

Institutional Members ($25/participant)

Guest and Non Members ($99/participant)

 

Facilitators: 

Diane Hamilton received her B.S. in Business Management from Arizona State University, her M.A. in Organizational Management from the University of Phoenix and her PhD in Business Management from Northcentral University. She currently teaches bachelor-, master-, and doctoral-level courses for six online universities. Her books and articles focus on understanding online education, career reinvention and understanding personalities in the workforce. At one of the universities where she teaches, her book The Online Student’s User Manual: Everything You Need to Know to be a Successful Online College Student, is required reading for first-time online students.

The sky is falling. We hear about it every day. The stock market is plunging, the housing bubble has exploded, and the list of doom and gloom goes on and on. How did we get here? We consider ourselves a bright nation. Why then, didn’t we see this coming? Did we get too greedy? Did we lose our common sense? Perhaps it was a little of both. What is important is what we have learned from our mistakes and the knowledge we pass down to our children to help them avoid a similar fate.

Unfortunately our children may end up sinking in our same boat. Even if they go to college, the personal finance education they will receive will be slim to none. While in college, our children are finding themselves more in debt than any past generations. Think about some of the financial statistics for our youth:

• 76% of undergraduate students have credit cards, while carrying a balance of over $2000, according to Nellie Mae. 28% percent of students roll over their debt each month.
• College graduates are finding that they are over $20,000 in debt, according to Creditcards.com.
• Charles Schwab reported in a 2007 survey that 45% of teens have credit cards but only 26% know how to understand how their fees and interest payments.

Whether we are looking at Generation Y, Echo Boomers, Millenials or any of the other names given to those born after 1982, it is important to understand that they have been raised to expect immediate gratification. Sixty Minutes did a recent feature discussing how companies are even bending over backwards to meet the demands of this high-expectation generation.

If everybody is bending over backward to meet their needs, what is going to happen when they have to be financially responsible for themselves? Why aren’t we bending over backwards to help them learn to be financially independent? We have seen that past generations (their parents) have been poorly educated and are apparently in no position to teach them. If it is not to be taught by parents who are uneducated themselves, where will they get this knowledge?

Currently many colleges and universities are rethinking their position in including personal finance education. Unfortunately these classes are mostly electives or only required by business majors. It costs upward of $6000/year average to pay for a child’s college tuition. What are they getting out of that to prepare them for their adult life?

What can be done?

• Colleges can create more course offerings to include personal finance education. Within the courses, texts need to be appropriate for all majors. Many colleges offer texts for these courses that are math-intensive, which can turn off the student who is not a math genius.
• As parents we can help our children by sharing our mistakes and explaining what we ourselves have learned in the process.
• K-12 Guidelines can be updated to include more specifics as to amount of “time” devoted to the financial literacy information our schools are supposed to be teaching.
• Personal finance books for younger students could be created in a story-telling format that would allow for them to relate the importance of what they are learning to their own lives.

If future generations are not taught to become financially responsible, who is going to bail them out? Are we going to have to just keep relying on the government to come to the rescue? It certainly isn’t going to be their parents, as they have lost their retirement nest eggs. In fact, their parents may be looking at this generation to take care of them.

Guest post by Diane Hamilton, who has a BS, MA and Ph.D. in Business Management. Her experience includes working in several industries including pharmaceuticals, banking and real estate. She has trained corporations in areas such as time management, emotional intelligence and Myers Briggs. She currently works as an online professor, working for 5 different universities. She teaches mostly business-related courses to bachelor, master and doctoral level students as well as mentors doctoral learners. She is in the process of writing a personal finance book for the young adult. Diane can be reached through www.drdianehamilton.com