Online students I've had to deal with

Caricatures of annoying online student behavior

Behaviors like these degrade the learning experience for everyone in online classes. Presented with apologies to Snow White and her seven dwarfs.

Busy
drawing of harried
personBusy always has something going on and is continually asking for deadline extensions. Her excuses sound legitimate (after all, life can get hectic for everyone), but classmates wanting to include her in conversations have to look in previous weeks' folders because she's late doing her own work as well as responding to theirs.

Oblivious
drawing of
faceOblivious has trouble with homonyms. He also uses sentence fragments far too frequently. His proofreading isn't all that great. Whenever someone happens to mention it, Oblivious just laughs it off. He doesn't realize — or, worse, doesn't care — that his errors weaken the impact of his writing on other people.

Wordy
animated drawing of
mouth talkingWordy thinks she's supposed to respond to every single post. Even when she doesn't say much, the time other people take to open and read her messages mounts up. Wordy occasionally has good ideas, but she writes and writes and writes. It's almost as if she cannot think without writing.

Coarsely
drdawing of
leering faceCoarsely seems to think the class is being held in the men's locker room of a high school gym. Inappropriate allusions creep into his posts. Then, when others protest that his humor needs cleaning up, he whines that he is the victim.

Disconnected Dan
cartoon drawing
of Disconneced DanDan has other priorities in life. Days go by, and he's not heard from. People ask him questions on discussion boards, and he doesn't respond. One gets the impression that Dan only reads enough posts each week to make everyone think that he is there.

Trite-ly
smiling face Whenever Trite-ly responds to a post you know it's going to be on some insignificant detail. Her posts have little to do with actual course content. Trite-ly seems to always be in some kind of very loose association mode.

End-times Edith
drawaing of
worried face Edith's all-consuming passion is Eschatology (End-times). So she finds certain signs of the end in everything, even in numerical codes she derives from the letters in the names of textbook authors. Edith's passion is end-times, and she's not about to let the subject of the particular course force her to concentrate on something else.

    -- Howard Culbertson,

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