“Now I Have Plenty of Time, and I’ll Make It All”: 5 Cognitive Traps of Online Studying and Ways to Overcome Them

Online education has many traps: changing format requires new skills, while universities and teachers are still looking for more effective forms of organizing the educational process. But you can already influence the effectiveness of your online learning. All you need to do is consider the five cognitive pitfalls that interfere with time management, mastering learning material, and communicating with students and professors.

We’ve all heard about the pros of online education: accessibility, time savings, the ability to review lessons and materials and decide for yourself where and when to study. Everyone who sells online courses talks about it: from small online language schools to huge educational platforms.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, both public schools and universities switched to online mode, which suddenly caused many students to feel like they couldn’t cope with their classes. Despite the apparent advantages of distance learning, there is a feeling that such a format requires much more effort from students than live classes.

On the one hand, the pandemic has contributed to the rapid spread of distance learning, but on the other hand, it has revealed its non-obvious drawbacks. If you are an online learner, it’s time to find out the potential problems of distance learning and prepare yourself for them.

Compulsion: Online Learning in the COVID-19 Time

Taking online courses voluntarily and being forced into distance education are fundamentally different things.

We decide to take online courses by ourselves, which is their great advantage. The ability to choose the place and time for classes give us a sense of autonomy, which positively affects our inner motivation.

But the forced distance education in schools and universities feels like another limitation, along with physical and social contact limitations.

Besides, the urgency of universities and schools’ switching to online mode has made it impossible to prepare learning platforms and build learning processes planned, both from an organizational and didactic point of view. Therefore, distance learning in the Coronavirus era is a unique situation with its peculiarities compared to online courses in “peacetime.”

5 Cognitive Traps of Online Education

It’s all about the non-obvious shortcomings of the online format and its novelty to our brains and psyches: faced with the unfamiliar, we fall into cognitive traps and make wrong predictions, leading to wrong conclusions about ourselves. Eventually, we stop making an effort or even drop a course or study altogether.

Let’s look at the cognitive distortions associated with the distance learning format.

1. There is no need to visit the university, now there is more free time for studying and other things.

Reality: the path to the university people master in the first two weeks of attending it and use this knowledge use them instinctively, but now you have to re-learn the learning platform and programs to participate in lectures and complete tasks. For many people, this turns out to be a blind spot. Due to the lack of the need to go anywhere and believing that most programs are intuitive, we wake up ten

minutes before the lecture and definitely are late for it. For five minutes, we were looking for a zoom link; for another five minutes, we trying to switch the private account to a study account, then we are looking where to download the necessary text, and on top of that, the microphone or camera doesn’t work for some reason.

We have to admit: that all of this takes time. Otherwise, stress is inevitable, and motivation to learn from poor organization processes and self-management is rapidly decreasing.

Moreover, all communication with teachers and classmates has switched to online, and instead of the usual dialogues during classes now, we often have to put up with a delayed response. As a result, it is much more challenging to plan our time, mainly if a vital decision depends on the answer of a classmate or professor. Most often, delayed responses slow down our pace of work and make us procrastinate more.

Solution: consciously set aside time for technical preparation and communication for academic purposes.

2. All materials are available online in the cloud or on the platform so that we can refer to them anytime.

Reality: yes, but if the physical space of the desktop is limited and visible, the virtual space is conditionally limitless, so it is extremely easy to get lost in it. Learning materials are frequently updated, which provokes a sense of losing control. And knowing exactly where the necessary information lies can be difficult to keep in one’s head. Consequently, we use only a fraction of the available materials and constantly feel like we’re missing something.

Solution:

1) Create a folder with an order that is convenient for you and download presentations to it: this way, you will begin to navigate the materials better and can find the proper document much faster than in the mailbox or on a learning platform.

2) Check the online platform regularly once a week – this way, you will get rid of the habit of following the learning materials more often and save your time and nerves.

Studying in the online format, we write down less in a notebook or don’t take notes at all since the lectures and presentations are available online. So we interact less with the study materials, which worsens the learning effect. So when we return to lectures and presentations later, we no longer remember most of the information since we haven’t taken the time to work through them, and now we see them as if for the first time.

You can take not only notes but also use the one-minute paper method: right after the lecture, take a minute and write down everything necessary that you heard during the class from memory. Studies show that students who regularly performed better on tests than those who did not use this technique.

3. I sit at home all day, so now I can study at any time, even 24 hours a day.

Reality: this is a variation of all-or-nothing thinking. It’s physically impossible to study 24 hours a day, and “all day” sounds tempting but unrealistic: we need to eat, sleep, rest, and besides studying, there will always be other things to do.

Solution: it’s essential to set your time limits and stick to them. For example, on Wednesday you have two hours to prepare a presentation, and on Thursday – four, on Saturday I have no critical things to do, but I know that I can work at the computer for only three hours so that I will book a place in the library for that time.

Although you can start studying at any time, it’s better to learn one subject regularly on certain days and at certain times. This way, you don’t have to decide again and again when to watch the lecture, which often reduces the likelihood that you won’t watch it.

Another good practice is to set aside time for emergencies. This can especially come in handy when doing lengthy papers – coursework and bachelor’s degrees when it is easy to make a mistake in estimating the time required to perform an experiment or search for reference. In the case of illness, such a reserve will also be worthwhile.

Take care of your future: set aside a week or two for emergencies. Then, if everything is all right, consider that you have provided yourself with a vacation.

4. While I’m at a lecture, I can cook soup, start the washing machine, clean up…

Reality: multitasking is a myth; in fact, we get really tired of switching between activities, we don’t feel satisfied with the work done, and our efficiency and motivation decrease.

According to cognitive load theory – the student’s working memory capacity is limited. Therefore, when we do several tasks at the same time, our energy is distributed among all of them, which leads to a decrease in cognitive capacity directed to each task, and performance diminishes.

No wonder we are more prone to multitasking when studying remotely than we are physically present in class because online learning involves mandatory access to the Internet. As a result, students participate in several online activities simultaneously when studying online, i.e., they practice multitasking.

Another possible reason for the increased propensity to multitask online is the unspoken social rules and norms that condemn extraneous activities during a lesson or lecture. And while in live classes, we tend to abide by these rules because of the presence of the instructor and classmates, the online learning format, when we are left alone with ourselves, instead contributes to their violation.

In addition, the self-regulation skills required in live classes are different from those needed in online learning. For example, a study by American scientists from Kent State University reports that students with self-regulated learning strategies could refrain from multitasking in traditional classes, but in an online format, these strategies proved useless.

Solution: allocate a specific amount of time to each task, turn off notifications on your phone, and limit Internet access if it’s not needed for a particular task.

5. Skipping an online lecture is easier as it causes less emotional discomfort compared to missing a live class.

Reality: skipping an online lecture remains the same as skipping a live lecture. The tasks are piled up, and more effort is needed later to work on them independently because you will have to do it without the support of the teacher and classmates.

Solution: observe under what circumstances you most often feel the urge to skip a lecture. Not prepared homework, late for fifteen minutes, scheduled the next meeting right after the class? If you find a repeating pattern, you should work with the reason for skipping the lecture. In any case, it’s much more expedient to work with the cause than with its negative consequences.