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What's your study method for taking SL courses? - Printable Version

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What's your study method for taking SL courses? - shamin - 10-23-2018

What's your study method for taking SL courses?
Do you study the books prior to paying monthly fee and take multiple courses at once?
How many courses at once have you taken in SL?
Please share with me the best practices and tips to take SL courses. I am planning to take some SL courses.
Thankyou

RE: What's your study method for taking SL courses? - Merlin - 10-23-2018

(10-23-2018, 05:43 AM)shamin Wrote: What's your study method for taking SL courses?
Do you study the books prior to paying monthly fee and take multiple courses at once?
How many courses at once have you taken in SL?
Please share with me the best practices and tips to take SL courses. I am planning to take some SL courses.
Thankyou

Since the SL fees now include the books, it really doesn't make financial sense to get the books on your own ahead of time.

Taking multiple courses simultaneously is doable, but is more work (and will probably take longer) and isn't really recommended. For me, I take each course one at a time. I usually planned for two weeks per course, but found most courses took about half that time.

The approach can vary since each course is different, but for the non-writing courses, I tended to follow the same steps:

  1. Sign up for the course.
  2. Review the syllabus to figure out which chapters tie to which quizzes or exams.
  3. Reach each required chapter and take the associated quizzes. These are open book, so some people recommend that you just skim the chapters and then take the quizzes, but you may not have time to complete the quizzes that way if you don't know the material. Plus some questions require a synthesis of knowledge, so I recommend taking the time to skim first and then go back to read them in more detail if you can.
  4. If you miss any questions on the quizzes, use that to help narrow down areas that you need to focus your reading & studying in.
  5. Use the quiz results to help study for the midterm exam (if there is one). The questions on the exams will often be similar or even sometimes reworded versions of those from the quizzes.
  6. Use the quizzes and midterm to help study for the final exam. 
  7. Take the proctored final exam. Some courses offer an open-book final exam, which can be handy.
Keep in mind that if you do well enough on the quizzes and midterm exam you often don't really need to worry about doing that well on the final exam. For most courses, the final exam only accounts for 20-30% of the overall grade, and you only need 70% to pass.

RE: What's your study method for taking SL courses? - activechamp06 - 10-25-2018

Personally, I just went into each quiz and knocked it out with the e-book and my current knowledge of the subject. I wasn't going to waste time studying for the subject when all of the quizzes were open book. As long as you achieve a 90% or so on the quizzes, you could literally put C for every question on the final and pass.

RE: What's your study method for taking SL courses? - Merlin - 10-25-2018

Ultimately the approach depends on what you want out of the course. If you just want to pass and you don't care about learning the material, you can sometimes get through the SL courses by relying on the open book option to look up everything as you go along (though this is challenging since the quizzes and final exam are timed). You may pass, but you won't learn much that way. If you really want to learn the material (a lot of lower-level courses are there to prepare you for more advanced upper-level work) then you will need to read the book and pay attention.

My personal goal is to get 100% (or as close as possible) in every course I take to validate that I've learned the material. You only need 70% in most courses to pass, so this is overkill. However, my goal is to move into a masters program once I complete my BSBA, so I'm focused more on learning the material than just passing the courses. Your goals may be different.

RE: What's your study method for taking SL courses? - Mab81 - 10-27-2018

I can get one course done per day (including the final) if I have an entire day to spend on it. I once did 6 courses in 6 days. I do not like videos or the slides they have, so i don't watch them. I take the quizzes (which are open book) and I use ctrl + f to search the textbook for answers. While searching, you naturally learn a lot of the material because you are reading thru the textbook finding answers. to me, this is way less tedious than trying to read the textbook on its own. Each time i pass a quiz, i save the Review page in a Word doc to look at later on to study for the final.

If it's an open book final, then you can use the same ctrl + f method to look in the e-textbook for answers during the final.

If it's closed book, I will study the vocabulary / glossary / key terms in each chapter of the textbook, and then look at some review websites online beforehand.