Course Policies Explained

In case you wonder why I impose what you might see as strict deadlines in my history courses, the answer is very simple: these policies are designed to give you a better chance of completing your course successfully. Furthermore, recent tightening of rules by the VCCS and NVCC require that students adhare more closely to course guidelines.

After more than two years of distance teaching I have discovered that students who do not complete the course most often fail because they just don't get started. The reason they don't get started is that there has often been no pressure on them to do so. Students realize that they have an entire semester to complete the work, and since there are other more pressing issues in most people's lives than completing an assignment that may not be due for several weeks, it is easy to put off doing the work. That has changed—students who fail to get started within a reasonable time frame will be withdrawn.

Why do so many fail to get going and thus fail to complete the course?

The problem comes from the fact that because most students are busy with jobs, families and other responsibilities, they will not have any more time later in the semester than they do at the beginning. When the work piles up, the task becomes overwhelming, and they either drop the course or ask for an extension. It is apparent from my experience that when students ask for an extension, they merely postpone the inevitable until the next “last minute.”

In order to provide you an incentive to get working right away, I make it mandatory that you complete each section of the course within a reasonable amount of time. Both courses I teach are divided into three parts and each part must be completed in approximately one third of the course duration. Except in the summer semester, the first week of each course is set aside for orientation: reading the syllabus, getting course requirements, making a study plan and perhaps laying out the text and lecture notes. As the length of the course is slightly shortened during the summer, you need to work that into your first week of study.

If you get an extension for part one, that does not give you an extension for part two. Thus if you get behind, you wind up in the same boat that many students find themselves in toward the end of the course; namely, they are too far behind to catch up.

The reason that I am confident that this will work for you is that this is what good students do. They complete readings on time, take exams on time and finish their projects on time. That way if they are interrupted by some unforeseen circumstance or emergency, they are not so far behind that they can't catch up. To have some flexibility, they often build a time buffer for themselves by completing the work as early as possible. A truly ambitious student could probably complete an entire course in a week or two, but whether that would be a good learning experience or not is debatable. The fact is that if you get to the point where you have to try to complete the entire course in a week, it will be impossible to do it well.

Good luck in the course. If you let these policies work for you, you should succeed in your online courses.

Sidebar: What about these links to Amazon and Google?

Full disclosure: If you click on one of the Amazon or Google links, I get a small sum on the deal that I can use towards maintenance of the web site. The amount is modest, perhaps $25 per semester from all sources, and since I have spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars learning web development, it's but a small payback. No one is under any pressure to use those links, and I will not link to anything I would not recommend.

Back to: Course Policy | History 121 | History 122 | Updated May 10, 2006