Moment of Self-Doubt

I went onto the the online site to check out my first online class and had a bit of a jolt. Many people had already commented on the site and their comments were very insightful and intelligent-sounding. Then I freaked out and realized this wasn't going to be like a fun blog or online chat. This was going to be work and I had better not embarrass myself by sounding friendly and conversational. So I backed carefully away from the website and regrouped. I'm going to monitor their responses and carefully select my words before I attempt posting a comment. Most of these people are old pros and already know each other because they were in the oline course that comes before this in the series. I elected to wait until this semester to take the class and the prof gave permission to take it as long as I read up on material that I missed. I did read, but I feel ill-equipped to respond to this overly-academic online forum. Most of my classes in the past several years have not actually required me to read the book in order to do well. Now I find that I'm going to have to develop reading strategies in order to do well, even take notes from the reading. All I have to say is, this shall be interesting....