Learner Module

Key Terms

Resources: The time, energy, attention, or care you put into an assignment. Outside help like peer groups are also resources.

Management: An optimal way of accomplishing tasks.

Balance: The spread of your resources.

Prioritizing: Dealing with tasks in order of importance.

Introduction

During a semester, there are many tasks that need your time, energy, attention, and care which can get stressful. To achieve your desired academic goals, you must find a way to balance the required tasks with your time, energy, attention and care. This section can help give ideas on how to find and maintain an academic balance to be able to do things you want to do, in a less stressful way.

Resource Management

Managing your time and energy so you can complete everything you need to be a key part of school. Poor management of these resources can lead to negative consequences such as poor productivity, decrease quality in assignment, and missed opportunities to further your learning and understanding. It can make achieving your goals more difficult and add unneeded stress.  

Techniques to help you improve time and energy management.

Plan and schedule your day
Analyze the required skills you need
Avoid burnout
Understanding when you get diminishing returns
Reflect on your past usage of your time and energy
An important part of managing your resources is that conflicts will occur. You will get new tasks to do when you’re already busy. To help you deal with this, the next part is about prioritizing your workload.

Prioritizing

Knowing what assignments to do first, second, and third can help reduce stress, improve your resource utilization, and improve your academic balance as you work towards your goals. There are multiple methods of planning and prioritizing you can use but each has their positive and negative outcomes. Depending on the situation you find yourself in, the methods below can be used to help you focus on your important priorities. 

Method 1: Important and urgent assignments
Method 2: Build momentum
Method 3: Relative prioritizing

Extra Tips to Help You

person looking away from their laptop. The laptop tries to get their attention.After studying for numerous hours, you may get fatigued or receive diminishing returns for time and work quality. It can be an innovative idea to take a small break to refocus. Below are some recommendations from students:

  • Get up and stretch for a few minutes after sitting down for so long. Yoga stretches can be used to stretch out your body and to refocus your thoughts.
  • Spend a few minutes looking away from a computer screen, especially looking longer distances. Going for a short walk can be a part of this.
  • The length of the break will depend on how fatigued you are. Sometimes the length will be a longer one day but shorter on another day.
  • Grab a quick snack to eat. Refueling your body with food will help energize you and recover from a fatigued state.

Activities iconActivity: Time and Energy Management Infographic

Purpose of Activity:

Use an infographic creation program of your choice to create a mind-map to help plan to reflect upon the school-life balance the student would do given 3 situations:

  • You have approximately 15 hours of schoolwork to do in 10 hours
  • You have approximately 10 hours of schoolwork to do in 10 hours
  • You have approximately 5 hours of schoolwork to do in 10 hours

Difficulty Level:

  • Level One: 30 minutes– Spend 30 minutes on this activity to help you reflect on your own values, beliefs, challenges, barriers, successes, and goals.
  • Level Two: 1 hour – Spend 1 hour on this activity to help you reflect on your own values, beliefs, challenges, barriers, successes, and goals.
  • Level Three: 2 hours – Spend 2 hours on this activity to help you reflect on your own values, beliefs, challenges, barriers, successes, and goals.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Students are able to better identify what they will do in a similar situation, and adjust unbalanced school-life actions.
  • Students are able to apply graphic design principles such as text and colour to create an infographic.

Task:

In this activity, students will need to create infographic to describe the school-life balance they would be aiming for when situated with different amounts of schoolwork loads. The graphic must incorporate the three situations, information about time management, energy management, and prioritization.

Students can use any design software of their choice – including those recommended in the module itself, or any other software they are comfortable with.

Students should submit their graphics (as long as they feel comfortable) as a JPEG or PDF.

How to Complete This Activity:

  1. Review the content in the Academic Balance section of the Learner Module
  2. Sketch out a rough design for the infographic
  3. Choose a design software to create your infographic
  4. Create the graphic using the software. Remember to include information about time management, energy management, and prioritization.
  5. Review and revise the infographic
  6. If you feel comfortable with sharing your infographic, submit it

exampleAn Example: 

Time and Energy Management. 15 hours of schoolwork in 10 hours. My Grades: 60%. I will try to get around 60% on most assignments. For 1 or 2 assignment I will try to get an 70-80%. My priority is getting the most important assignments done first. This is stressful. 10 hours of schoolwork in 10 hours. My grade: I will try get the marks I usually get. My priority will be to complete the easy and shorter assignments first to build momentum to do the bigger assignments. Just enough Time. 5 hours of school work in 10 hours. My grades : 85% I will try to get 80% or higher on each assignment because I have the time. My priority is to do the activities that sound the most exciting to keep me motivated.

What do I do with this?

If you are playing along using the Liberated Learner Work Binder, upload your infographic to the Learner Module folder.

If this is the only Liberated Learner activity you plan to do, then save the file wherever you’d like.

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Liberated Learners Copyright © 2022 by Terry Greene et al. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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