Success in Distance Education requires discipline and conviction. While there are several tips on how one can plan for a successful distance learning course, a constant among most methods of preparation is to be consistent. Being regular with your learning ensures that there is continuous learning. The ideal way to maintain a regular plan is by studying daily.
Schedule
Planning a daily schedule to cover all the topics is a popular way of being disciplined. This requires a pre-planned schedule in which each day is dedicated to some topic and there is some buffer in case the topic turns out to be lengthier. Some topics may require more days of effort while others may not. Having a schedule ensures that one can keep track of the progress and also that one does not need to wait until the last leg of the course to study.
Consistency
Being regular at the course also ensures consistency. Being talented and intelligent may take people far in life. But in the long run, people who are consistent at what they do tend to overtake individuals who did not work enough. Studying regularly with a dedicated time slot of a few hours is all it takes to build that discipline. Discipline is also essential to ensure that there is a check on the progress of learning. Without discipline, the learning would happen in a random manner and this builds up a lot of pressure until the end of the course when final exams are near.
Be wise and revise
While having a daily schedule to learn new concepts and ideas is essential, it is also important to dedicate effort on revising. Making sure that as part of your daily schedule you learn something new and revise something studied earlier is a great mix of a plan. This helps in relooking at your areas of weakness also and gives the learner a view of which topics might need more attention than others during the course. Otherwise, learners realize much later in the course that a few topics are hard to understand and dedicating more time to them takes away time to study remaining topics. So the key to a better daily plan is to keep components of learning new topics and revising a few covered earlier.
Collaborative Learning
Making a group to discuss your lessons daily is also a great way to learn more about the topics. Learners also learn better by sharing the knowledge they acquired. For some individuals, group studies are more effective. Individual in groups tend to divide topics among each other and they teach respective areas. This facilitates learning and enhances understanding of the topic because now learning happens through conversations and discussions.
Every learner can bring their perspective to the topic and thus retention of the lesson tends to be higher. Some students give the toughest topics to the brightest learners so that they can individually cover the easy topics and are sorted for difficult areas as well. Collaboration can indeed help more with tough subjects and is recommended by many distance learning courses.