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Being in college is a big challenge for many students and some may find it more difficult of a transition compared to others. We all have had issues before regarding our distractions, our motivation, and our stress from the pressure of the workload and the enormous environment of campus. Luckily for us students, there is plenty of guidance and resources that are around to help us improve our studying and manage our stress. The Ohio State University offer great resources for those who need support in their well-being, as while we may feel physically exhausted from working on the large amount of homework, it is more important that our mental health remains well and bright. Resource such as the Counseling and Consultation Service, the Student Wellness Center, and the SMART Lab provide the additional support that students need in their difficult times. When you face struggling times, you may feel that you’ve lost some of your motivation to continue on your program and may even have some thought on pursuing a different path. Ultimately, the reasoning behind your motivation comes from your intrinsic and extrinsic sources. You will have to manage your intrinsic thoughts of your personal interests and curiosity in a subject along with your extrinsic beliefs in achieving good grades or earning a respectable amount of income in your future career. All of these decisions have to be made by you and these decisions are what will shape your skills and abilities to further learn and grow into your chosen path for the future.

Links to sources:

Counseling and Consultation Service

Student Wellness Center

SMART Lab

One of the most common assignments that you will encounter in college will be to write an academic or research paper. You might think you have a lot of experience with this from your time writing essays for your high school classes, but it is a much different experience in college.  If you are looking to work on learning the basics of writing a good academic or research paper, you can check out the links below to see the traditional structure of an academic or research paper. One challenge in writing academic papers for new college students are the importance of locating and citing reliable sources that support your argument. After reading through our module this week, I found a useful guide on how to certify the credibility of your sources according to the book e-Learning Companion: A Student’s Guide to Online Success. Three criteria are to be met to have a credible source: reliability, quality, and utility.  Reliability refers to how reliable the producers of a source are and if they have the credentials and the review to be credible. Quality of a source relates to the actual quality of the information being put out and if the source is consistent and unbiased over a certain topic. The final aspect is the utility of a source, which focuses on the how relevant the information is to you and to your audience and making sure it is appropriate for your research. The book goes into more detail in improving your searching and researching of sources online and includes more tips on how to improve your overall online learning experience. If you are interested in the book, the link below will direct you to the product for you to purchase.

Links to sources below:

Writing an Academic Paper

Writing a Research Paper

e-Learning Companion: A Student’s Guide to Online Success

Preparing for quizzes and exams for your classes is vital in your success in passing them, and the first step in achieving that success is to write down good notes from your lectures. Professors give you quick and informative lectures and if you lose focus by daydreaming for just a little bit, you might have just missed something very important in your learning. It is therefore absolutely essential that students should give their full attention to the lecture and write down notes. Taking notes is the best way for students to collect the information given during lecture and retain that information for future studying. However, lectures go by quickly so you will miss something and you definitely can’t write down every single word being said before the end of the class. The solution to this is to understand a way to take good notes that works for you. In the video below by Thomas Frank, he talked about five of the best note-taking methods for college students and the pros of each method in helping you take better notes. One method I’ve been using with great success throughout my college career so far is similar to the outline method, which allows you to write information based on hierarchy and use bullet points to summarize details from your lectures. I would definitely recommend checking out the video to see what method of note-taking you have been using or to find a new method of note-taking that works best for you to efficiently write down your notes during lectures.

Link to the video: How to Take Notes in Class: The 5 Best Methods – College Info Geek

This week’s module focused on learning new strategies for online reading and studying. Online courses not only don’t have in-person lectures, but course textbooks and studying sources may also be converted into eTextbooks online for better convenience. With the absence of a hard copy textbook, people like me feel disadvantaged in the switch to eTextbooks. Some disadvantages I experience are the distractions on a computer and the unhealthy time spent looking at a computer screen. It’s not easy to fully focus reading the text if I can easily create a new tab and do something more enjoyable instead. Continuously looking at a computer can make our eyes tired and dry if you don’t take adequate breaks from the screen. Practices I have been implementing to help my online learning from eTextbooks include highlighting important terms and information for future studying, creating mnemonic devices for better memorization, and reading end-of-chapter summaries to focus on key ideas. These practices have helped me improve my studying and memorizing for exams as they provide the foundation on what material I should be focusing on and making sure I understand the main concepts in each chapter. One idea I hope to implement in my future learning would be utilizing mindmaps. This study tool allows you to create a web diagram to outline different points to better structure your ideas. I find this a perfect tool to help me to perform outlines for future papers in a visual context to hopefully better summarize my ideas.

Link to mindmaps:

Bubble.us

As students in college, we don’t always have the best time management since we generally are just very busy people. However, we also don’t always utilize our time wisely working on assignments and one of the biggest factors for that is procrastination. Procrastination usually starts with just almost starting the project or paper, and then something pops up that you think you need to do first. After that you figured you may as well finish something else that you wanted to do, and it goes on and on. It becomes a downward spiral of inactivity on achieving what you wanted to do from the start, which was just to do your first research for the project or type the first sentence of your paper. The video from the series, ‘Tales of Mere Existence’, perfectly demonstrates what happens when your procrastination takes over. From this week’s module, the most useful thing I learned was that we should first identify why do we procrastinate. Three categories of students were brought up in the video ‘Why Students Procrastinate: 3 Hidden Reasons’ on why we procrastinate: Those who fear failure, those who fear success, and those who oppose authority. If you push assignments to the last minute because you fear that your best work will receive criticism, you procrastinate out of fear of failure. If you procrastinate because you don’t want to stand out and are uncomfortable being looked upon as “different”, you fear the attention of your success in not procrastinating. The third category of procrastinators are students that just don’t like to be told what to do, even though they have to do the assignment to pass the class. I highly recommend you look at these three categories and see where you fall into and afterwards notice you reasonings in procrastinating and slowly change your habits to better manage your time.

Video Links:

“Procrastination” Tales Of Mere Existence

Why Students Procrastinate: 3 Hidden Reasons

This week’s module provided plenty of topics and tips in helping us students become more familiar and professional in our online communication. One aspect of this week’s module that I learned and found helpful were the tips in dealing with ‘lazy’ group members in group projects. I’m sure that as students, we have all experienced this working in group projects. For online courses, this may be a bigger challenge than before, as most likely there won’t be any in-class meetings to communicate with your group members in-person. While sometimes we may feel that certain members aren’t doing enough or doing ‘equal’ work in a project, perhaps there are a few steps missing in fully engaging every member to work in the group. Two tips from the video provided below that I found very informative and useful for future use are to assign roles and tasks for each member and to create mini-deadlines throughout the project in order to not fall behind. These tips encourage engagement from each member to be held accountable and complete given tasks due at certain times before the official deadline, making sure members are focusing on the project and completing it well before the due date. In the transition to more online learning, I highly recommend students to use a tool dedicate to group work as mentioned in the video, such as Google Docs. My experience with a tool like Google Docs brought more involvement and commitment from group members during projects as it allowed each group member the ability and the time to join on whenever convenient while also providing a template for every member to operate on at the same time to share ideas and details.

Video Link Below:

5 Tips for Dealing with Lazy Group Project Members – College Info Geek

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