In the world of COVID, classes have been almost entirely online for almost a year now. While many are still remote and have a set lecture, there are many asynchronous courses that students are struggling to keep up in. With a semester as crazy as this one, it is more important than ever for us to stay organized in our asynchronous courses and stay on track as much as possible.
Step 1: Choose how you are going to lay out your course week. There are so many ways you can mark down all your classes for the week. I personally prefer an hourly layout because I can see exactly how long a class is going to take so I can further determine how long I have for studying and determine my club meetings for that day. However, if an hourly layout is not the layout for you, you could always use a standard vertical or horizontal layout.
Step 2: Look at your schedule. Check out all your classes. See which classes have a set time and which ones can be done on their own time. Mark the ones with set times in whatever way works best for you. This could be highlighting, circling, writing it down or any other way. Whatever way you decide to designate these courses is entirely up to you. You just need to be able to distinguish your synchronous courses from your asynchronous courses.
Step 3: Put all your synchronous courses in your calendar. These are always the first courses you should list in your calendar because these count against you the most if you miss a lecture. Putting in your synchronous courses first allows you to determine when you can complete your asynchronous courses. As a result, your asynchronous courses can become semi-synchronous courses meaning that while it technically does not have a set lecture time, you have designated that you will work on that class at a certain time on a certain day.
Step 4: Take another look at your schedule and schedule out your asynchronous courses. Now that you have all your synchronous courses marked down, you can now determine when to complete your asynchronous courses. I personally have one asynchronous course, so I chose to put it on my lightest course levels day. I only have one course on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I selected three hours out of both days to work on my asynchronous course. While I do not always take the full three hours or occasionally go over, I find the three hours is a great estimate of time. I also have it early enough in the day so there is plenty of time before my synchronous course just in case I do go over. Scheduling out three hours of the day also allows study time for the specific course instead of having to carve out extra study time.
With a crazy semester consisting of many asynchronous courses, we need some sort of stability, and scheduling out these courses will make your life just that much easier. By scheduling out a lecture time for asynchronous courses, you will have that much more control over your schedule, and you will not be as stressed as you would if you completely forgot about the course until the end of the term and struggling to get everything in on time.