How to Succeed in This Distance-Learning Course (and All Your Other Ones,Too)

1.  Consider the course as part of your job(s).  You probably work many hours during the week on or off campus, and so you understand self-discipline.  This course is also a job, but you don't get paid in cash 'til later in your life, although you do get rewarded with grades and knowledge in real time.  Complete each module.  Take notes.  Don't allow yourself to multi-task and do other stuff while listening to these lectures.  Be awake.  Be there.

2.  Figure out when you are at your sharpest during the day/night.  That is the best time to routinely do your studying.  If  you can discipline yourself to set a routine and stick to it, you will find that you become very efficient at studying.  Your mind learns to expect to study at a particular time of day, and studying will become less difficult.  Many people get "A"s and "B"s in this course.  You can too.

3.  Get organized.  Know where your notebook and textbook are.  Get into a study group, but don't rely on them all the time.  Your mind learns differently and more deeply when you are on your own.  Within the study group, explain different concepts, diagrams, and textbook figures to each other.  When studying alone, don't dismiss the old ideas of "flashcards" and plain old memorization.  They work.

4. Go through your course notes as soon as physically possible after a dl lecture, even if it isn't until later that evening.   If you have time, write or type them out again.  If you don't have time, read through them and make notes on them,  adding anything that you remember that will clarify things later when you are using them to study for an exam.

5.  Use the Quizzes and Midterms to prepare for the Comprehensive Final Exam.  A comprehensive final exam means that the instructor is reaching back through the whole course to put together the questions for the final.  Where do those questions come from?  They come from the ten quizzes.  What is your best way of preparing for a comprehensive final exam?  Take all ten quizzes, and use them to study.  Go over questions you marked incorrectly and find out what the correct answer was and why.  The quizzes are your built-in study guide for the comprehensive final.

6.  Ask questions when you don't understand or need clarification.  Ask on the Discussion site.  Ask on email.   Don't be shy about it.  What do you care what other people might think-its your grade you are earning, not theirs.  If you have a question, probably 20% of the class also has the same question.  Just ask.

How to Use the Textbook Efficiently

 The textbook we are using, Wicander & Monroe, 6th edition, is a wonderful book with an enormous amount of information and great graphics. You have probably already realized that Geology is really, really visual.   Here are suggestions for reading and using the textbook efficiently.

1.  Read the chapter summary first.  Its at the end of each chapter.

2.  Then look carefully at the maps and diagrams, and read the figure captions that accompany them.  They should look familiar to you from lecture.  Can you explain these maps and/or diagrams to somebody else?  If they don't make sense to you, email your instructor or ask about them on the Discussion site.

3.  Read the assigned reading shortly after you have completed steps 1 and 2, while the summary and figures are fresh in your mind.

4.  When reviewing for a quiz or final, review the maps and diagrams again, keeping in mind that the instructor will not have covered in lecture everything in the chapter, but what has been covered in lecture as well as appearing in the textbook is very likely to be on the exam

Getting "A"s

     There are plenty of studies that show that students that set a routine approach such as the one presented above perform significantly better than those who do not.  Also, students that spend on average an additional fifteen minutes a day beyond the usual work for a course are the most likely to score an "A" in that course. 

Why bother?

     Why bother to succeed with an LER?  Because GPAs do matter.  High GPAs open doors to great opportunities.  Because these courses add breadth to your adult life, and if you retain some or most of this knowledge, they can improve your life in years to come.  Because, as Louis Pasteur once said: "Chance favors the prepared mind".