Even in traditional settings, the majority of your time is spent outside the classroom or lab. The difference is that on campus all you have to do is look around you to find other students, distance learners have to connect to the Internet. But is the ‘isolation’ all students experience at one time or another really any different? Or is it merely exaggerated and exacerbated for distance learners by the nature of asynchronous communication?
What makes it worse is that most of us are stretched to the limit already, juggling a fulltime job, family, friends, and other commitments, that we sometimes miss the opportunity to meet people who share our interests and have similar career goals and aspirations, and the very real chance that along the way we’re going to become acquainted with many and friends with a few of them. While the technology is vastly different, the principles are the same.
The course management system, your student portal, provides a safe environment for sharing a little personal information asynchronously and the means to continue threads offline and synchronously through chat and instant messaging, one-on-one or with a small group.
In the traditional setting, each of us has a sense of community – we see our classmates in the lecture or lab, and sooner or later we’ll run into them somewhere else on campus, so breaking the ice is fairly routine. For distance learners, we have to take the initiative or risk going through the entire program never meeting a single person.
All it takes is one person to reach out, to share a little personal information (married? children? pets? hobbies? favorite books, movies? professional interests? goals?) to shatter isolation. Remember, your classmates are in the same situation, so someone can probably relate to just about anything you bring up for discussion. The next thing you know, others will join in and each of you will have created community.
Traditionally, many significant lifelong friendships begin on campus. Why should it be any different for distance learners? A little more complicated perhaps because of the asynchronous modes of communication, but that does not have to a permanent limitation; it’ll be a long, long time before I meet some of my online friends in Japan and China, but I can assure you it was a real pleasure to finally meet friends from Australia and Iceland that I’ve know online for years. Other relationships can be strictly professional – which is a form of networking, but also a community if you choose to make it so.
Don’t get into a rut of all work and no play! Use the chat room and instant messaging! Get to know your professors and your classmates! Don’t try to do this entirely in stealth mode! Or anonymously!
You can also go outside the virtual world when dealing with isolation – talk with family and friends. They are your best support group. Generally, they are completely out of the loop on subject matter, course requirements, etc., but they can bring a little reality back into your life and help put a different perspective on things – which can be enormously helpful at times.
College students and alumni proudly wear their school colors and logos, but so far I haven’t noticed too much of that from distance learners. Maybe that has something to do with being hundreds or thousands of miles away from your school, and rarely if ever meeting a fellow student face-to-face. Maybe the ‘contact’ would be there if we slapped on a bumper sticker and occasionally flashed our school logo in public.
