How to be a successful learner in an online course

1. Pay attention to your physical learning environment - try to arrange everything ergonomically in your learning space.
2. Take breaks from your computer screen: look at something else every few minutes to keep your eyes razor sharp and stand up to stretch every 30 minutes.
3. Pay close attention to the due dates of assignments.
4. Plan ahead and plan well.
5. Check your e-mail regularly, but be patient while waiting for responses.
6. Always check the file size when you try to upload a file to share. The bigger the file size, the more difficult it may be to upload and download.
7. Communicate with your instructor and/or classmates by e-mail, discussion forums, messaging apps, or phone.
8. Use courtesy in online communication and deal with conflict with respect.
9. Participation is important to your learning experience in an online learning environment, so be confident in making contributions.
10. Be aware that there are resources to help you: your instructor, ITS, or a librarian.

How to Computer

Essential skills for using a computer that will make you look awesome in front of everyone else.

Don't keep things on your desktop.It looks messy, and keeping lots of files on your desktop can actually cause decrease your computer's performance. Store your files in your Documents folder or another folder within your home directory (i.e. that folder with your name that contains your documents, pictures, and downloads folders).

1. Organize everything in folders. Put folders within folders and use them to sort files by type, project, or whatever makes sense to you.
2. Use descriptive and easy-to-use filenames. Downloading an image from online? Rename it from whatever horrible long string of characters it's called by default, and call it something that you can identify by name (e.g. "grumpy-cat"). Never name a file any variation of "final" -- you will inevitably have to change something and create files with names like "final-final" or "final-9" (I think I got up to 17 once).
3. Don't use spaces in your filenames. This is super important for web development! Many programs will get confused if a file includes spaces in the file name. Use hyphens (like-this), underscores (like_this), or camel caps (LikeThis).
4. Save frequently. Save your projects as soon as you begin them, and save periodically while working (?+S on a Mac or CTRL+S on Windows). I have seen students spend hours working on a project only to have their computers freeze and loose all their work because they never saved.
5. Backup frequently. If you're keeping your files on your personal computer, save backup copies on an external hard drive or with cloud storage (your PSU account includes free storage with Box but you can also use Google Drive or Dropbox). Always keep your files in at least two places (three is best). Remember that every hard drive will fail some day.