Kel's Declassified Online College Survival Guide
Just like Mamma Mia, here we fu***ng go again
Alright y'all, the vaccine is just around the corner. Until then, we need to keep up with our 8+ hours of staring at a screen everyday with the tiresome online learning environment we were presented with in the end of Spring 2020 (which feels like decades ago by now). It sucks, but it’s what we’ve got. A price to pay for our health. I don't know if it's a small one, but it's certainly a price. I think we all know what it does to us by now.
To make the whole experience just a little bit less dreadful, here are some of the resources I gathered throughout last semester to improve my at-home school experience. And I'm not talking about some wishful "wake up early," "be on time" and "stay organized" recommendations; here are some realistic, actually useful things you can do that don't sound like life coaching tips.
1 — Get a Second Monitor
Zoom conferences. Notes. PDFs. Schedules. Articles. Check Twitter and fall into the Wikipedia rabbit hole every 15 minutes. Just one screen is not exactly the most practical way of handling everything.
Adding a second monitor to your setup is one of the best things you can do to improve your online experience. Personally, I usually leave my Professor's lecture maximized on the right one and take notes on the left one. It's also perfect for group projects; you can leave the Zoom/Facetime/chat/whatever window open on one of them and work on a slide/document on the other.
2 — Night Shift and Dark Mode
Eye strain is REAL. It's usually recommended that we "stand up every 20 minutes and take a walk" so we don't hurt our eyes for staring at screens for long periods of time, but we all know we won't do that. So there are two things we can do to make our screens a little bit less eye-burning.
The first one is reducing the blue tones in the screen. Most computers have a Night Shift Mode (here's how to activate it on Windows, MacOS, and Chromebooks), but if yours doesn't for some reason, you can get Blue Light Blocking Glasses.
The second one (my personal favorite and VERY underrated) is just turning on dark mode for every website, even those who don't have it on their native settings. By installing the Dark Reader extension on Chrome, you can automatically turn just about any bright page into one with dark tones. My favorite use of this is in Google Docs; I spend some numerous hours writing essays over there, and the fact that it's all bright stresses me out even more. Ever since I installed Dark Reader, my essay-writing experience improved a lot.
You're probably going to want to see the actual colors of things before turning stuff in just to make sure, so you can pin the extension on your browser and toggle the dark mode on and off whenever you want.
3— Use Google Keep or Calendars
I'm not a big schedule-follower, but it does take some minimum level of organization to don't fall behind in this whole online college experience. I'm a visual person, so while I like to organize the stuff I've got to do on post-its, they're not really ideal or practical digitally speaking. I find Google Keep to be the next best thing.
I create a different note for each one of my classes and, before each week starts, I go through each class's syllabus and make bullet points of everything I need to do for that class for the week (lectures to attend/watch, chapters to read, activities to turn in, projects to work on, etc.) and the day I plan to do each of them. I usually just copy and paste them directly from the syllabus and try to simplify them as much as possible so there's not an overflow of information. It's also smart to check your e-mail and other sections of your class that might have some secret assignments that the syllabus doesn't list, just in case. As I complete each activity, I just erase them on the post-it. If something requires a bit more time, I just break it up into multiple days.
I'm not much of a specific time allocation person for activities, knowing the day I will do something is enough for me. But if you are, Google Calendars is probably your next best bet. There, you can setup regular activities (like live lectures) and specific times and alerts for the things you have to do. Takes a bit more time, but if it's your thing, go for it!
4 — Discord with Classmates
You may be completely lost and slowly dying inside, but hey, so is everyone else! A Discord server is the perfect place to share your daily struggles and make things a little more comforting.
One of the hardest things about online learning is the lack of side-chats with classmates in the middle of the class or not actually feeling like you're in the same boat with lots of other people. Discord takes care of that just fine.
Since the Fall 2020 Semester began, I created a dedicated Discord server for any people in the same major as me in my university to join. I invited a few friends I already knew and shared the invite link on discussion boards in all classes I had, and now we have over 100 people over there. We have dedicated channels for each class, for campus-sponsored events updates, for automatic reminders we set up, and much more. There's even a channel just to play with a game bot once in a while when we're tired and just want to chill, and it's just what we need right now. It gives us an opportunity to connect and collaborate with each other, meet some new people, and feel just a bit more normal.
Out of all the things I recommended today, this is probably the one I'd recommend the most. Gather a few friends and start your own!
And well, that's all I have for now. If you have any other tips, you can leave a comment here to share it with other people.
I wish all of you good luck on your second (and let's hope, your last) full online learning semester. See you on the other side!
