College Study Tips

You may have gotten by in high school by frantically reviewing your notes at 7:15 a.m. on the morning of an exam, but don’t expect to get away with that in college. So says Sherrie Nist, coauthor of College Rules! How to Study, Survive, and Succeed in College (Ten Speed Press, 2002).

As a college educator at the University of Georgia who helps students with their high school to college transitions, Nist should know. After all, she’s seen A+ high schoolers turn into 2.0 undergrads time and time again. But that won’t be you, right?

Of course not! Especially not when you’ve got Nist’s scoop on successful student strategies.

Take action (with texts and lecture notes)
While you may have depended on rereading chapters and rewriting your notes as your main study plan before, things will be different at the college level. “You may have to read 250 pages a week. You can’t reread that three or four times,” says Nist.

Instead, adjust the way you read and take notes. “Since college is a passive activity (you sit there, listen to lectures, take some notes), anything you can do to make it more active is a benefit.” For example, jot notes in a textbook’s margin to highlight key points, reflect on your reading, and review class notes. “Your high school history teacher may have given you a study guide before a test, and all you had to do was memorize it,” says Nist. “Professors in college assume that you know the content; they expect you to synthesize and analyze issues.”

Time is on your side … or is it?
Think about this: You’re going from 7 to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, of class in high school, to 15 hours per week in college. So why is it that college students are always saying they don’t have time to get things done? As Nist states, “students may have more time on their hands, but they don’t know how to manage it.”

In other words, just because your entire day isn’t bogged down by class after class, this doesn’t mean your schoolwork day is over. “I encourage students to have a 40-hour mindset. Those are the minimum hours you’ll work per week for a full-time job, so you should be a student for 40 hours a week, as well,” she says. Don’t worry–that includes class time, too!
Article provided by The CollegeBound Network

Report Shows Online Learning Growing

Students taking online courses account for 17% of the total population of 17 million, the Sloan Consortium says.
The number of higher-education students taking online courses is increasing steadily, with about one in six students logging on to the Internet to get instruction, a report released Thursday showed.

Nearly 3.2 million students took at least one online course in the fall 2005 term, a substantial increase over the 2.3 million reported during the same period a year ago, according to the annual study published by The Sloan Consortium and financed through a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Students taking online courses account for 17 percent of the total population of 17 million.

The more than 800,000-student increase in the fall was more than twice the number added in any previous year, the report said. “There has been no leveling of the growth rate of online enrollments; institutions of higher education report record online enrollment growth on both a numeric and a percentage basis.”

The study, which is based on surveys conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group, also found that chief academic officers believe the quality of online education is equal to or superior to face-to-face learning. Fully, 62 percent rated both forms of learning the same, or online better, compared with 57 percent in 2003. The percentage rating online as superior rose to 16.9 percent from 12.1 percent.

Academic leaders saw the same barriers to widespread adoption of online education as in previous years. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents cited a need for more discipline on the part of online students. Other roadblocks included faculty issues that included acceptance of online teaching and the need for greater time and effort to teach online. Academic leaders did not see a lack of demand on the part of students, or acceptance of an online degree by employers as barriers.

The largest institutions, defined as more than 15,000 total enrollments, were the most likely to have online offerings. More than 96 percent offered online courses, and about two-thirds have fully online programs.