If you are holding this paper, you are likely a distance education student. There are many reasons to choose distance education over in-class participation, not the least of which is convenience. It’s possible that a prior engagement prohibits you from attending school full-time: you may have a job, a disability, a child, or other family member that requires full-time care. Whatever your reasons, you are now a student and have added a new responsibility to your circumstances—to complete your course or courses to the best of your ability. Though the task before you may seem daunting, there is a method to being a distance education student that will ease the transition. After all, your new task requires a very defined set of skills—self-direction and time management—and one pre-existing condition: commitment.

Hopefully, before you even began to consider becoming a distance education student, you first considered whether you have the necessary skills to succeed.
Education is not only costly but it is time consuming, a combination that makes time management an essential skill. You must be able to effectively manage your time in order to balance work, home, social and educational commitments. Goal setting is also extremely important, for this will allow you to self-direct and evaluate your progress towards your intended end. Perhaps more important than any learned skill, however, is your commitment or will to succeed. Your commitment to your education will have an enormous amount of influence on the outcome. The reason for its profundity is simple: you always work harder for something you really want than for something otherwise imposed on you. Ask yourself: do you really want the knowledge and experience that completing the course will provide?

The profound impact of commitment can be best illustrated using my own family as an example. Both my husband and I have been taking correspondence courses over the past year. When my course materials arrive, I open the packages at the first available moment and read the manual for each course, thereby determining what is required and expected of me, devising my plan of action as I go. My husband’s reaction is the opposite—he puts off the work until it becomes absolutely necessary to work, then he frantically completes his assignments, passing sometimes by a hairsbreadth. Meanwhile, I’m able to finish my courses calmly and with consistently high marks. My husband is an intelligent man; in fact, he probably has a higher IQ than myself. He took the courses of his own volition and was certainly capable of much higher marks, demonstrated by his award winning status in college. So what happened?

Quite simply, it is a matter of commitment. I’ve always wanted to have a career in writing. I would have majored in English right out of high school had I realized how many career options were available for an English graduate. I have plans for my future that include writing, editing, and publishing. My husband, on the other hand, is not pursuing his career path because it is what he always, or even recently, wanted. He pursues it because it is one of only a few career options available to him. He has a physical disability that keeps him from working the in manual labour jobs that are so common in Northern Ontario: mining, construction, forestry, and so on. Manual labour is off limits to him. So, he is pursuing a career in accounting, an occupation that will not require him to be on his feet or use his hands for strenuous work. The result is that, while I work hard towards my goal with my greatest desires in mind, he takes a much more lax approach to attaining his, because we have different levels of commitment to their completion.

All that said, hopefully, the course materials that currently lie nearby are there because you truly want them to be. Now, you need to devise a strategy that will help propel you towards your goal. Start by evaluating your current schedule and taking the course requirements into consideration. The manual provided with your course will help you determine how much time you will need to complete your course successfully. Weighing your current commitments against the course requirements, you must decide what time of the day or week is best for you to work. If you have children, perhaps you can take one day a week to go to the library, leaving the kids with your spouse or a babysitter. Don’t forget to be flexible in case your initial plan needs revising. Remember, if this is your first time utilizing distance education, your scheduling efforts will likely be a matter of trial and error. You may need to rework your plan at least once. Just keep at it and don’t give up: it takes more effort to succeed than to fail.

While distance education can be overwhelming at first, approaching it with your goals in mind and a plan of action will greatly lessen the strain it places on the rest of your life. Set goals and work towards them systematically, keeping your course requirements and own expectations in mind. As demonstrated, it is important that you also evaluate your skill base, for basic skills like self-direction and time management will definitely become a factor. Ultimately, your commitment to your education will play a pivotal role in your success or failure. In the end, it all comes down to your will to work, for work you will.