What advice might an experienced distance learner offer?
• Find out more about your own learning preferences. • Make a timeline mapping out your ideal progress through the program, setting monthly and annual targets. • Keep a learning diary, detailing your daily progress, no matter how small: a long sequence of empty pages should tell you something! • Maintain regular contact with your tutors (and with other learners if possible.) • Don’t stop because you can’t find a specific book/article; use what you have. • Don’t get bogged down in endless aimless reading. Read for a specific purpose. Having decided your purpose, can you develop an attack plan to extract what is relevant from an article in about 20 minutes, and what is relevant from a book in one hour? • Have you developed a good mechanism for storing what is relevant from your reading? • Don’t worry so much about how much you have read but rather about how well you have integrated your reading into your own critical argument. • Remember that ultimately you are judged not upon the quanti
