Why Online Learning is a lot like Preparing for a Marathon - Characteristics of the Online Learner

Seems disparate, doesn’t it? How does the very physical marathon run bear any commonality with the mostly sedate activity of online learning, you ask? Well let’s take the major points:

1. Dedication: Preparing for a marathon requires a lot of dedication. Marathon runners are a special breed, taking on an intensely personal quest that is definitely an ordeal of endurance as it is a battle of physical as well as mental fortitude. To accomplish an online learning program or degree requires essentially the same perseverance and resolve. Online learners realize sooner or later that the responsibility for learning rests completely on their shoulders, and this is a burden that on-campus students do not share. Dependent on the directions and coaching of a teacher who is physically able to respond to their needs, traditional students benefit from the external motivation offered by their environment, which is absent in online learning.
2. Flexibility: The changes in terrain and weather that one usually encounters on a distance run create a need for flexibility of both mind and body. This same kind of flexibility is likewise necessary to be able to transcend the usual classroom environment that most learners start with, and adapt to the less constricting but highly alienating borderless world of online learning. The adjustment phase is an ongoing, continuous thing that only ends when the learning itself ends. Indeed, there are more drop outs in the world of online learning than those in campus, most of the drop outs attributable to the inconsistent conditions of online learning. The same value that makes online learning such an appealing thing, the capability to manage one’s own learning schedule, is also the very thing that promotes the variability which in the end makes it a burden for most online learners to go through.
3. Challenge: For runners, the marathon is the ultimate challenge, one that is about the passion to run as much as it is about winning a race. Facing this challenge mostly alone, the marathon runner knows he is mostly battling against his own body’s capacity and weakness, and needs to find the confidence and the faith in his own abilities in order to make it through. Online learning is likewise just such a challenge, offering anxieties and difficult transitions for a first time online student, who would have to deal with the learning landscape of both the program he has enrolled for and the computer environment on which his learning rests, and forcing him to acknowledge that he must find the motivation within him in order to succeed. Nurturing a new set of abilities that are necessary towards fulfilling an online degree and seeing a course to its end, the online learner knows that he has embarked on a journey that is quite a distance to take.
4. Discipline: All athletes know that any sport is all about discipline. Marathon running requires a whole lot of it to begin with. So does online learning. Without the discipline to stick to a program, efforts will later prove futile. With a different set of study skills required of the online learner, including an independence from any previous learning system and a resolve to find information and answers on one’s own, the student engaged in an online learning program knows how discipline is the key to fulfillment.
   
   

Tag: Characteristics of the Online Learner