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5 Ideas for Sustaining Motivation for an Online Course

You have signed up for a reputed online early childhood education class and you are pumped up and ready to start. While some people carry this enthusiasm for the entire term, others find it on the wane week after week.

How can one sustain motivation during the course of the entire program? Here are a few ideas for you to help maintain your initial motivation for successfully completing the online course.

Goals

Set your goals firm and clear by writing down and reviewing them periodically. Make sure you keep both your long-term and short-term goals in mind. The short–term ones can be your weekly or daily objectives related to the program.

The long-term goals are related to finishing the course or the online degree program. It is normal for interruptions to happen every now and then, warranting adjustments. Consider the interruptions as challenges and modify schedules as warranted.

Organization

Staying organized is of great help and strength. Ensure that you create schedules for weekly and daily tasks. In case you are juggling demands of family, work, and school, you can plan fun activities combined with school and work tasks. Healthy breaks for relaxation and fun are bound to be rejuvenating and strengthening your motivation for learning.

Challenges

Recognize your challenges and address them squarely. Failure to meet challenges immediately may create a snowball effect. For instance, say you default an assignment a week, and the following week you need to complete two. If you fail to clear them both, you find a third one added up next, then another and so on until you are completely overwhelmed by an unmanageable number due.

When challenges start to build up, you may feel like quitting as your grades fall or you feel like losing the race in a class. Being proactive and seeking prompt help whenever you fall behind is the best way to avoid a backlog and diffuse a crisis build-up.

If you are constantly rushing to finish your work, then maybe it is time to reset plans and goals to a more ‘achievable’ and realistic level. Meeting challenges successfully and achieving goals promptly would certainly help maintain motivation and boost confidence level.

Support groups

You can receive loads of help from support groups; they may be colleagues, family, and fellow students. It would be good for you to discuss regularly challenges, shared problems and successes with your support group; it gives you a sense of strength, confidence, well-being and control of things. Supportive friends can always give you new ideas to meet all challenges.

Communication

It is important for you to communicate with instructors and classmates. Learning online does not mean you have to do it all alone. A live communication channel keeps you abreast of deadlines and schedules and makes learning fun. You may continue to communicate even after the completion of the course.

These tips can certainly make online learning much easy and great fun.

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