Maggie McVay Lynch, manager of distributed education at Portland State University, and author of "Learning Online: A Guide to Success in the Virtual Classroom" (Routledge Study Guides), has some sound advice about orientation programs for online learners.

She explains that the most effective orientations to online learning are provided online, not in any face-to-face learning environment where students muddle through potential problems with the help of a live facilitator or instructor. It’s better to have the real deal, with students working through a replica of the virtual teaching and learning environment, experiencing actual problems and figuring out what resources and solutions are really available to them before taking their first, full-credit-bearing online course.

McVay Lynch adds that she does not stress how to use software in the orientations that she has designed. "Anybody can learn how to use software," she says. More important is knowing how and what kind of technical support to take advantage of, when, for example, you run into a problem at 11 p.m. when you are working on the last-minute details of a homework assignment due the next morning.

McVay Lynch also claims that many orientation programs leave out "the psychological part of working online in a degree program." In particular, adult graduate students whose last higher education experience was in a classroom many years ago typically struggle with learning how to manage their time in the online environment, as opposed to having the structure of a face-to-face meeting. Sometimes the responsibilities of their online course work "goes to a backburner while they are attending church with their family, going to a baseball game, working late, or traveling on the road," she says. "So, all these kinds of (time management) skills that we take for granted with adult learners really have to be emphasized in an orientation."

Additionally, reviewing and practicing the communication elements of a typical online learning environment is vitally important in an orientation program. "Communicating via e-mail, and communicating via chat, or in a discussion forum - no matter how much you have done that informally - in the formal environment it can be kind of scary," says McVay Lynch. "Most people are not the best communicators in writing. For example, when someone writes something in a critique such as ‘I thought your paper needed this or that in order to be better,’ the student being critiqued reads into it, thinking ‘oh my God, I am a total failure.’"

In the final analysis, an orientation needs to show students how to figure out, through trial and error, what constitutes a formal or informal communication. To cover this in an orientation, McVay Lynch asks, "how do you actually engage in interpersonal relationships when you are not seeing people face-to-face? How do you check back and forth - whether it is with your professor or your fellow students - as to what’s the real meaning of your communications when you are confused, or upset, or wondering how you are progressing?"