Online students I've had to deal with
- Seven behaviors of online students that irritate me.
- Cringey habits of otherwise wonderful online students.
- Online instructors' gripes about students can often be solved by minimal effort on the
student's part, making both the instructor's and students' lives less stressful.
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
Busy 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
Oblivious 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
Wordy 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.
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- Coarsely
Coarsely seems to think 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
Right now Dan's got other priorities in his
life. Days go by and he's not heard from. People ask him questions online 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
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
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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