VTVLC Student Blog
How to Stay Motivated While Learning at a Distance
For many, the freedom to determine your own schedule can also create challenges around staying motivated. It can be hard to find the motivation to be productive in classes that are difficult for you, especially when you are limited from in-person contact with peers and teachers. But there are many ways that you can stay motivated and, with that, be successful and efficient in your difficult classes.
One of the best ways is setting an attainable plan for finishing the semester’s workload. This helps me break up my big projects into smaller pieces that don’t seem like gigantic, overwhelming tasks. It also keeps me focused on my daily workload instead of focusing on, and dreading, how much work I have left in the semester. My plan consists of breaking up each week’s work into five equal pieces. Then I assign each of those equal chunks to a day of the week. I do that for every day of the semester and after I finish creating the plan, all I have to do is follow it for success.
Another way that I stay motivated, as well as deal with the stress and frustration that comes with being a student, is taking a break and doing a short workout. In fact, one of the reasons online learning works so well for me is that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to get up and take a break to exercise if I were in a traditional classroom. A series of easy calisthenics works for me, but for another person, this could be some stretching, a meditation, or anything else one would do during a break to clear their head and get their mind off of the subject at hand for a while. Workouts like this energize me, as well as help me get rid of some of the built-up frustration I accumulate. After taking a break like this, I go back to my schoolwork with less frustration and stress and more positive energy.
One last important tip for staying motivated in your online schooling is to take classes that interest you. It is much easier to learn about a subject that you are interested in already. So if you choose to take classes that you want to learn about, it will be harder to get demotivated. It is very difficult to be productive in classes that don’t interest you. From my experience, all of the classes that I have taken just to boost my GPA I didn’t enjoy and were difficult to get through. This lack of interest led to lack of focus, and I procrastinated completing the work. If you are in a situation where you are unable to change your classes and you are stuck in classes that don’t interest you, try to look forward to the classes that you have that do interest you. Make sure that you space out the classes that don’t interest you so that you don’t have multiple days back-to-back that you won’t look forward to. Overall, from my experience it is much easier to stay motivated in school when you take classes that interest you, instead of classes that merely look good on your transcript.
“After I finish creating my plan, all I have to do is follow it for success.”
Those are just some of the tips that I have found help me. I create semester plans and PACE charts ensure I know what assignments I need to complete every day in order to be successful. I take breaks when I start to feel demotivated or frustrated. Finally, I try to take as many classes that I am interested in so that my interest will motivate me. These are the major methods that I follow in order to stay motivated and successful in online schooling and hopefully they can help students that have been thrust into online schooling, without a choice, as well.