A Review of U of A’s Learning Remotely eClass
By Laura
As we all know, classes will be almost solely online this semester. To be completely honest, I hate online classes. I’ve taken online classes before and they went well, I just have trouble motivating myself to work on them. I’m sure that I am not the only person who feels this way. And here’s the thing: the staff at the university are well aware that this is going to be a difficult year for a lot of people. So, in order to help students out, the University of Alberta has created and released an eClass course that gives students tips and suggestions for improving their online learning experience (which you can find here). If you are interested in enrolling, scroll down to the enroll button and follow the instructions! Once you are enrolled in the course, you should get a confirmation email and it will show up like a normal course in your eClass titled “Learning Remotely - A guide to successful online learning.”
Working through this course was an interesting experience. It took me about an hour to complete and felt to go by fairly quickly! It’s broken down into a few units including “Effective Time Management & Remote Learning,” “Online Lecture Learning and Studying,” “Online Exams and Assignments,” “Academic Integrity,” and “Communicating in a Remote Environment.” Each unit consists of a video and a test and there is a resource folder for each module on the eClass page.
Each video contains a lot of information and helpful tips, suggestions, and advice. I honestly think they’re beautifully animated and very well done. They were engaging, interesting, and I learned a lot — there is quite a bit of information packed into each video. There were a few things in them that I already knew and practiced (like planning out my week), but overall there was a lot of good advice and it helped to reinforce my good habits. In particular, I think their advice about having separate spaces for studying, eating, and resting (meaning doing each of those things in a different location if at all possible) is amazing and something that wasn’t intuitive to me. They say it helps to boost productivity because once you sit at your desk your brain will switch more easily into study mode. This is something that will be very helpful this coming year when we are constantly surrounded by distractions in our homes. Overall, I really enjoyed watching them!
Following each of the videos there is a quiz. This part I didn’t enjoy as much. I didn’t want to do quizzes since this wasn’t a course I was doing for credit, but the quizzes were very easy and there were no trick questions. I think the quizzes really did help to solidify the information I learned in the videos.
Some advice: the study tips provided by the eClass only apply to a specific kind of course — the kind where you go to class, sit in a lecture, read a textbook, and then write a test. As someone who is in a lot of language-based classes where almost all we do is translate texts, my courses are a bit different from this and the study methods that they recommend in this eClass don’t really apply to me. However, that does not mean that their methods ONLY apply to students in traditional courses, it just means that the methods they suggest may need to be adjusted to other types of courses.
The course also provided some great resources in addition to the information in the videos. As part of the course they talk about scheduling out your week, blocking time to study, attend classes, and other things. One of the resources they provide to help with this is a printable schedule which you can access under the specific module resource folder.
[Editor’s Note: new course resources are added regularly.]
They also have links to various important resources for students this year! Some include frequently asked questions about online learning, a link to academic skills workshops (which can be found here) that include new workshops for remote learning. The final resource as part of this course is how to access university resources within mainland China, which looks like it will be super helpful for students living abroad and residing within mainland China for the next semester.
Overall, this is a very informative course. This semester is going to be hard in many ways, online learning being one of the changes we as students are going to have to get used to. As online courses can be quite different from in person classes, especially if you have the option to learn asynchronously, I really recommend that students check this course out. For one hour of time, the course is really worth it.
