by Karen Costa, Inside Higher Ed
I completed course work for my most recent graduate degree almost entirely online. I’m confident in saying that I was one of the most active participants in my courses. One of the things that I noticed as an online student is the importance of the time I was allowed to reflect on ideas due to the asynchronous nature of my courses. When I took traditional 55-minute land-based courses, I often thought of an answer to my professor’s questions four hours after class ended. I always felt like I was two steps behind everyone else, because introverts need time to process and consider internally. Like Joe, land-based courses made me feel like a fish out of water. As an online student, I could finally swim. Very little has been written about whether introverts are more successful in online courses, but Rick Harrington and Donald Loffredo did consider the question in their 2009 article “MBTI Personality Type and Other Factors That Relate to Preference for Online Versus Face-to-Face Instruction.” In their admittedly small study, they found that introverts were more likely to prefer online courses while extroverts were more likely to prefer face-to-face.
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