Reference letter

[Chankosumo]

As someone who was Pre-med for a while, letters of recommendations are one of the things I read up on a lot as an online student. When you get a course you feel you can excel in, make sure you take your time and be as helpful to everyone else in class as possible. If your discussion requirements state that you should have 4 weekly interactions, try to do 6 or 7 every week. Chat back and forth with your instructor often. Ask them if there are any bonus assignments you can work on. By going above and beyond, and being in touch with your instructor often, they will learn more about you and your work style.

Also, do not ask the first week. Make sure they have had a few weeks of working with you before you broach the subject with them. You want them to be able to talk about your work ethics and what you are like as a student. That is much better than them writing a letter than just states "this person attended my classes and got an A". There needs to be some substance to the letter. Also, if you happen to have any classes being taught by high ranking school officials, those are good options to focus on. For my Pre-med letters of recommendations, I had the Dean of Mathematics and the Dean of Global Studies write my 2 academic recommendations.

A lot of the times profs will have you draft the letter for them as well, especially if they dont know you super well

This is also important because every letter that I have requested, was also met with a response of "Do you have a draft available of what you were looking for?"

These generalities do not seem very applicable to YourPace UMPI. Interaction with classmates, discussions, or being in touch with instructors is not really the norm (at least in the program I am in). Which to some is a major (if not the most important) reason to choose UMPI as their school. Yes, there will be those people who may claim to have had such an amazing interaction with the instructors, almost a buddy-like relations and so on. Yet, whether they speak the truth at all or at least slightly exaggerating (likely due to the very positive outcome - successful graduation) is for everyone to decide for himself/herself. 

Requesting a letter of recommendation should not be made to seem like one is begging the instructor for one. Yes, we do have to take into account that this is CBE. Yet we do put enough effort (which can somewhat be gauged by our grades) to feel comfortable enough to request that letter of recommendation. This all is, however, only my opinion. This is how I see it - if you have had 3 (again - my opinion) classes with an instructor and you had no issues (frequent need to be assisted by the instructor) with milestones, final assessments, or due dates (or doing everything at the very end of the term), I believe you have all the right to request a letter of recommendation. How the instructors are going to judge whether they should respond positively to your request is up to them. But no diligent student should be asking himself/herself a question like "Did I deserve to request a letter of recommendation?".