Success in online program can be a fleeting thing. In fact, it is far easier to fall behind and find yourself looking for the "way out" in an online course than it is in the brick-and-mortar classroom. That's why it is important to know several "musts" that I feel each eLearner should possess, maintain, and embrace:

Part V - The "Musts" for Online Learning

Motivation
At first, this is an easy one. The fact that you're going online to take a class usually means that there's some sort of motivation involved, whether it be personal satisfaction, completing a degree, or for the advancement of your career or to open the door to additional opportunities. Whatever your initial motivation, you've got to remember that maintaining that motivation may be the key to your success.

Once the "newness" of the online educational experience wears off, one may find that the joy and novelty of exploring this new learning medium is gone. Pressures from work, home, family, and your own need to find time for yourself may push down on the internal drive that led you to enroll in an online class in the first place. So how do you make sure that you maintain the important "must" of motivation?

Different methods work for different people.

Goal setting is one way that works for many. When you feel your motivation flagging in a course, sit down with your syllabus and outline a few goals that will help you get through it. Spread these goals out over the remaining length of the course, and mark each one completed as you finish them. Pretty soon, you may find yourself motivated anew.

Another way to enhance motivation is to provide yourself small rewards for various accomplishments. Promise yourself a special dinner once you've completed a important essay or reward yourself with a special personal gift when you've finished a particularly challenging class. Only you know what rewards you can promise yourself to ensure that you're motivated throughout each class.

And one important tip for staying motivated: interact! Make sure you participate in the online classroom experience. Even though your instructor may not require you to post Q&A's in the class forum or chat, carve out some time to do so on a regular basis. Engaging yourself with your fellow students and the course material is one very good way to stay motivated.

Patience
Patience is a truly "must" have for online students. If you're like me, you looked at your first set of online classes and thought that they seemed awfully easy. Looking at it from that point of view, it can be quite simple to convince yourself that you can load up on classes right away and finish your degree in a jiffy. I'd have to say that it is the rare individual who can successfully balance work, home, family, self and an overloaded schedule of online classes.

Online doesn't mean easy. In fact, the detachment from classmates and classroom can make even "easy" courses harder. Maintain the patience necessary to ensure that you don't burn yourself out or fail in classes where you'd normally do well. Overloading yourself or setting unrealistic timeframes to complete your degree can be a huge mistake that's easy to make.

Just because your school counselor tells you that you can earn a 4-year degree in 18 months online doesn't mean you actually will, or that you should actually try. Start slowly and add more to your plate if you can manage it, but diving in headfirst and overloading yourself is a recipe for disaster.

Be patient, and you will succeed.

Technological Respect
This is a big one. When I refer to "technological respect" I'm not saying you should attempt to become a programmer or a Web guru, nor do I mean that you should fall down in homage to the PC. What I mean by this is that it is important to understand and respect that there is a technological component in taking an online class that can contribute to your success or failure.

For instance, you may have a class that has a Sunday-at-midnight deadline for the submission of an assignment. Waiting until Sunday at 11:30 PM to submit your work may be convenient, but what happens if you try to log on at 11:30 PM and find out that your Internet connection is down? How about finding out that the school's computer is unavailable? Or what happens if you attempt to submit your assignment just before the deadline and your attempted submission returns an error?

Plan around the technology that's used for your online classes.

And, one other thing that it very important to remember and awfully easy to forget: distance learning is a medium that is not bound by a physical location. That means you need to be very aware of things like time zones and their relationship to your online classes. If your instructor tells you that your assignments are due on Sunday nights at 11:00 PM, you'd better make sure you're clear about which 11:00 PM they're talking about. If your school's computers are located on the east coast and you're in California, you've got to take the time difference into account, the school most likely won't be doing that for you.

Notes that Help You Succeed
And here's one little secret I've been holding onto for a little while, waiting for the right time to let you in on it. We all know about note-taking and using notes to help ourselves learn. It used to be, to me, that "notes" meant jotting down relevant information on a piece of paper and putting it aside to be used later. However, there is a whole wide world of note-taking methods out there, some of which are outstanding forms for use in the online classroom.

Now here's the secret link that you can use to help yourself become a master of notes:

Jim Burke's Web Page on Notemaking

Jim provides information and some examples of several dozen different types of notemaking systems. When I discovered Jim's site, I was amazed at how many different types of note systems there are and how some work better than others, depending the material.

Take a look at Jim's site and explore the various note systems. You'll be glad you did.