Time Saving Tips for Online Students

    Online college is becoming a more prominent and efficient way to achieve academic goals while maintaining a regular working lifestyle. This is especially helpful to single parents or those returning to school after a long absence. While attending classes online can help save time, travel and money there are many ways online students can save even more time and energy while completing their studies.

    The majority of online work is going to need to be completed in Microsoft Office Suite. Having an updated version will save a lot of time and effort, and if your planning to attend school online, make sure you brush up your skills in MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint. This will save you time and effort later. There are many tutorials on the Microsoft Website that can help you get up to speed in these programs, remember preparation goes a long way.

   The Microsoft Website also offer many advantages that can help an online student be more efficient. One way to save time and effort is to find and save templates to your computer. If you are using an APA format for your studies, create a document with your APA header and save it as a template. This way when you open up and begin a new paper, your APA formatted header and title page are already completed. Over the course of a two year degree program, this simple step can save hundreds of hours of formatting.

   Try searching the internet for powerpoint design slides. These can be saved to your computer and kept handy for those presentations, this can save you a lot of time searching and come in handy on those last minute assignments. Focus on professional and business slides and templates as these will be the most common types of presentations. Having these design templates ready for use is another way that will save tons of time searching.

  Create a desktop folder to keep your coursework organized. For each class you take create a new folder and store your work, you may find previously completed assignments are helpful for completing future assignments and some course work may be allowed to be re-purposed for new assignments. Also, get yourself a flash drive and copy all your class folders to it. This will be particularly helpful if you have to go to the local library or another computer. Having your personal files to take with you may save you a ton of time.

    One major time saver I used while I was attending online college was the purchase of Dragon “Naturally speaking” software. This is voice software for the cpu that allows you to speak into a microphone and let the program do the typing. This is an especially solid purchase for any student who knows they will be typing many college papers over the course of a degree program. Dragon software routinely allowed me to produce quality term papers quickly. The average time it took me to type (with not so great typing skills) a good college paper was about 2 hours. After I bought my copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking, i reduced the time it took to type a good paper to about 35 minutes.

      If you are soon to attend online college, Dragon software can save you an incredible amount of time and effort. Consider this, Instead of searching the Internet for plausible references, sorting out what information is good and relevant to your paper and typing up a solid paper while flipping back and forth between pages, you can simply read a page and speak it in your own words creating a reference document free of plagiarism and ready for use in your paper. Now THAT is saving time.