Despite what you may have heard, it is not all that easy to be successful in online college courses. In the case of genuine academic education, the term “successful” usually means making an A or a B, and earning these grades is more difficult than it would seem at first blush. While the commercials on television and the Internet portray online education as something that one can participate in while wearing pajamas or even less, it should be understood that the inclination to associate pajamas and easy college class work is an illusion. Unfortunately, many first time online college students expect the courses they sign up for to be less rigorous than the ones they would attend at a traditional college or university. These students imagine that logging into their online classes is enough to earn them a high grade for the course. In other cases, some online students are under the impression that the online Instructor will hold their hands throughout the courses, and this is simply will not happen because the person leading the course had many more duties than most online students imagine or understand. Further, some students think that the Instructor will be more lenient about assignment deadlines than their counterparts in the traditional classroom, and that the quality of the submitted work will be less energetically evaluated. Nothing could be further from the truth, and, indeed, such assumptions about the nature of online college courses will often lead to frustration and, ultimately, failure.

This all may sound like dire admonishments, but it is all too often exactly the reason online students in online degree programs withdraw from schools online. Happily, it is quite possible to be highly successful in online college courses by acknowledging the importance of promptness, thoroughness and frequent participation.

It is easy to understand how this somewhat stern view of success in online college classes can be daunting, but it is important to remember from time to time that earning an online college degree can be a life changing experience, and, as such, it deserves all the attention online college students can afford to give it.

There is no substitute for promptness in academic work. The deadline for submitting an essay or taking a test is just that: the deadline. Keep in mind that online course are driven by computers, and they do not require sleep for food. Expecting your online Instructor to give extra days, and sometimes weeks, for you to submit your assignments or your test is an invitation to disaster. By and large, the purpose of deadlines is to train you to make time to do the academic work. The reason this is important is that the farther you progress in your academic work, the more difficult and time consuming the work will become for you. If you do not learn how to make time, so to speak, to complete your assignments by their due date, you will falter and, possibly fail when the workload is increased in more advances online college courses. The best advice is to learn immediately how to rearrange your life to accommodate the deadlines you face in online classes. If you are prompt in turning in your work by the deadline, you will almost certainly be rewarded by a higher grade. If you persist in turning your work in after the deadline, you will inevitably receive a lower grade. Just as a commitment to promptness can have very positive effect on the grades earned in online college courses, so too can the thoroughness one invests in the assignments lead to a happy outcome at the end of the course.

Just as in traditional college classes, online college courses often require a high level of writing. This requirement is the result of the realization that college students need to learn to write in an academic fashion if they are to be successful when taking higher level courses. Many times, online college students will write a long essay every week for six, eight or eleven weeks. There will be instances in which major revisions of the writing will be expected by the online Instructor. In almost every instance, research will part of the essay writing, and the research must be documented in a specific manner, such as MLA or APA format. So, in addition to the initial writing, there will be detailed research and there will be a specific documentation to be learned in order to complete the assignment. It cannot be emphasized to strongly that any attempt to shirk the thoroughness of the written work of online college classes will lead to disappointment and low grades. However, if a college student taking online courses makes it his or her business to as thorough as his or her ability permits, a very positive outcome, meaning high grades, can be expected time and time again. While promptness and thoroughness pay a very large role in the eventual outcome of college students’ academic activity in online college courses, frequent participation is of utmost importance.

By far, the most important element of success in online college classes is frequent participation. Frequent participation means, in the simplest terms, logging into your courses almost every day. The participation requirement is spelled out in detail in the class requirements. Often, students are required to log in at least five days a week. It does not count to log in several times a day. The online Instructor of the online college courses is also required to log in a specific number of times a week, and in the case of both students and Instructors, a digital log is maintained in order to identify those who have been absent from the online courses for too many days. It is worth pointing out that infrequent participation very often leads to poor grades and a sense of being overwhelmed by the work that is still to be completed and turn in. Suffice it to say that logging into your online college course should become as quickly as possible a matter of habit. The most successful students in online degree programs attribute their good grades to the high frequency of their participation in the online discussion threads because this regular contact with the online class keeps them abreast of the deadlines and assignment particulars.