Public Relations Writing: Online Study - 1

Online courses are different from classroom courses.

I know. I not only teach them, I've taken them.

The first online course I took, I thought the big advantage of "learning on my own time" was that I could procrastinate. That's the whole idea of an online course, I thought. If you don't have time for weekly study, you can put it off and let the work accumulate -- then put in an all-nighter and catch up.

I was wrong.

On that particular course, because there was very little feedback from my instructor, I was able to get away with doing very little work, until the final week when I completed about 75 percent of the coursework.

But I cheated myself -- all I did was fulfill the requirements of the course. I didn't really learn a thing, except how not to teach an online course.

My second course was not much better. Because the teacher was so disorganized (again, almost no feedback), I figured I could put off my lessons until he or she (I never even learned my teacher's name!) got around to giving me clear instructions. Wrong again! That resulted in a whole round of hassles.

So I've come up with a few simple rules for this course, which are intended to make it much easier for you to understand how it will work. The most basic rule is this: you can do your work whenever it's most convenient for you, but you will still have regular deadlines -- just like the real world of public relations.

Go on to the next page.