I will be taking online college classes - noise level

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I will be taking online college classes starting on September 19. I'm lucky to rent a nice apartment, but the noise level at the apartment complex can be so annoying. The noises include kids outside and loud music. I'm not sure how studying and completing homework in the apartment will be. Any suggestions on dealing with the noise for classes?

Children's noise is a more difficult problem because you can't communicate with them too much.

When I have a live online class where my mic might have to be on to respond to group discussions or whatever I make sure that the TV on the main floor is off and others know it's 90mins of quiet time. TV on upstairs or downstairs can't be heard on the main floor.

In an apartment setting you can't really control your neighbours.. but if you have a good/neutral relationship with them and Need loud music turned down during a live class, you could simply ask them if they would keep things quiet during your class time like I ask the others in my household. They might be very understanding and respectful - depending on how you ask.. if you're nice, you might get an ideal result. If you scream at them to STFU then they'll tell you off/laugh/turn up the music. Might be worth asking.

As for studying with relative quiet.. foam earplugs. Could add earmuffs over top, too. Makes for much quieter reading time when you can't control all the background noise.

For watching video content, use headphones.

If you can't get outside noise turned down during actual live class sessions, use a headset with a microphone. I've seen others on my video feed use things like that - pretty sure it's because they can't control noise of kids in the background of the home etc but with headphones & mic they can hear everything and speak to us w/o picking up all the background noise.

Library

I feel for you, this was one of the big challenges I had with going to school online.

To the extent you can, you can schedule around the worst of the noise. If it's kids and parties, then it's probably less of an issue in the middle of the day. You can also try and cover it up with noise cancelling headphones. If it's particularly bad, you can probably layer a relatively loud noise generator at a fixed frequency. That should make it easier for the headphones to cancel the sounds that are coming in from outside, but not be much of an issue for the headphones to cancel.

Libraries weren't a viable option for me as they are now also community centers here and can be quite loud.