What is it like to take an online college class at Lone Star College?
LSC offers four different types of instruction. In person (face to face), Hybrid (a combination of in-person and online), Online Live (with scheduled meeting times), and Online Your Time (100% online, with no scheduled meet times).
As you search the LSC course catalog and select your classes, you can filter the classes by locations, sessions, open/full, subject and instruction mode. We find the class options have had great selection.
My son took an in-person winter minimester at LSC - CyFair last semester. Three weeks of federal government on campus for about 3 hours/day. He absolutely loved it and is looking forward to returning to full-time in-person this summer. But because of my son's classes and schedule, he elected to take online classes at LSC this semester (though these were not his first online classes, so we do have some other classes and formats to compare them to).
Now that he is five weeks into the online classes and into the swing of how they work, I thought it was a good time to share how they are going. When you log in you will go to the landing page.
From there you will access their online learning platform, D2L.
From there you will see a list of all the online courses you are enrolled in. My son is in an Art Appreciation class and a Texas History class. You will also see a place for notifications from instructors, email communications,
Each class you are enrolled in will have their own course page. This is my son's history class page:
You can very easily see what is due, deadlines, access any announcements, and check grade updates. I like the "checkmark" feature on the right that shows the progress.
On the righthand portion of the screen there is a "Work to do" checklist that quickly lets you know the work that is due for the week, what you have completed, and due dates.
We have experience with other online college classes, and I feel like LSC's online class organization/platform is really great. It is not quite as wonderfully straightforward as Arizona State University's Universal Learner platform (which I would rank as the absolute best, especially for students new to online college classes), but it is still really good. LSC has a mandatory orientation video that students must take before they can open up their first class.
Some things worth noting. You will not be able to get the class syllabus OR the class booklist until after the semester begins. If you have an instructor willing to share, you can reach out by email to request the syllabus (we had no luck with this, as they all said they would be adjusting the syllabus right until the class started). My son did send emails though to request the book lists ahead of time, and he has (so far) been successful in knowing all the book lists ahead of class time. This definitely helps to gauge the workload of the class. Is there a 300 page textbook and 10 additional books? It may not be a great fit for a student that struggles through reading. Are the supplemental books boring? Are they books that might be too mature for a dual credit student? (Yes, this is a real concern). Is the textbook mandatory? This can really blow the budget if you are unable to find a place to rent the book and it costs $200 to buy, that starts to defeat the savings you are reaping from using dual credit. It helps to browse through the books ahead of time too, to see if the content is on-par with their abilities.