Liberal Studies This Week

I’m narrowing in on 20 years of advising students so, while I am always suspicious of experts, I suppose I have learned a few things worth sharing. The #1 best advice I can offer any student? Go to class. The moment you start considering class meetings as options rather than obligations, is the moment that you begin to drift away from the goal of graduation, or at the very least, learning. Woody Allen said that 80% of success was showing up and he couldn’t be more correct.

I would suggest that simply going to class will raise your grade by one letter, even if that’s from an F to a D. Holding out the option that you can just skip means that there’s no pressure to prepare for class so skipping class leads to skipping readings which leads to lesser understanding of future readings which leads to weak background knowledge which leads to confusion in future classes which leads to frustration and a lack of confidence in your academic pursuits. For many students, this leads to dropping classes and, for some, to just dropping out altogether.

What’s that? Online students can’t skip class? Sure they can, they just skip class mentally rather than physically. If you rush through your online material, aren’t you skipping class? What about if you view your online courses as a series of deadlines to meet rather than a learning process? Or, if you go to your discussion board and quickly post something that requires no thought? I’d say that’s skipping class because you’re not taking advantage of the opportunity in which you’ve invested your money.

Of course, Liberal Studies students don’t skip classes – this is just the #1 best advice overall. The #1 best advice I can offer you is to use eDocs. I keep repeating this in various formats so I must really believe it

If you don’t know, eDocs is an online document management system. All UIS students have 1 gigabyte of storage and all you need to do is log into the eDocs system to use it http://edocs.uis.edu If you’re comfortable with technology, you can probably figure out how to use the system on your own, but there is extensive training available online at http://www.uis.edu/its/otherservices/edocs.html

Why should you use eDocs? Simply put, to protect your investment. Each semester I hear from at least one student who has had a hard drive crash or a storage device that has been lost or stolen. They’ve lost everything related to their degree and their UIS classes. I would encourage every student to start an eDocs folder for each class they take and to put everything from that class into the folder: syllabus, assignments descriptions, readings, handouts, the work you’ve turned in, the feedback you’ve been given. Doing this will result in a neat portfolio of your learning. Even better, it will result in an off-site back-up of your learning.

E-Docs has a lot functionality and there are some really cool and useful things you can do with it but if all you do is use it like a hard-drive for your UIS classes, you may never realize how much easier you’ve made your life.