Serendipity35

Being online in a course (or just being online) offers lots of online distractions. There is so much else you can do - Facebook, YouTube, shop, check email. When a student is online in your course and the LMS activity log is telling you that they have been in the course for 6 hours, do you really think they have been working on the coursework for 6 hours?

A recent study found, not surprisingly, that limiting distractions can help students perform better and also improve course completion. In a paper, “Can Behavioral Tools Improve Online Student Outcomes? Experimental Evidence From a Massive Open Online Course,” (Cornell Higher Education Research Institute) this month, the author looks at the online behavior of 657 students in a nine-week MOOC on statistics offered by Stanford University.

Students were assigned either to a control group or to use one of three online time-management tools with different approaches: commitment, reminder, and focus.  the committment tool was the one that had "statistically significant" positive results. Since the tool blocked extraneous surfing, it seems to have improved course completion, homework submission, and scores by making time on distracting sites less enjoyable with the software in place.

One surprise for the author (Richard W. Patterson, a Cornell doctoral candidate in policy analysis and management) was that the students who were most likely to benefit from the commitment tool were the ones who self-reported as being most concerned with their work and grades.Patterson had expected the the weakest or least-prepared students would be the main beneficiaries.

Anyone who has taken or taught an online course knows that good time management is very important to success in online courses.