A student turns off their camera, opens three other tabs on their laptop, and only partially pays attention to the teacher speaking to them from the screen. Even though the teacher has set up the session and fully prepared the slides to present to the student, the two are not able to connect properly to achieve their goals in the session.
While online education can now reach many people and be held at any place and time, there is a big difference between possible and effective. Even the best teacher can fail to engage students online. Often, it is not because they did not want to, but because the format of online education, as it currently stands, does not support participation. Access to education has increased dramatically over the past few years. But attention to what is offered online has not increased at the same pace. Thus, the main challenge in online education today is to engage students’ attention and to keep it throughout the learning experience.
Interactive and effective online learning is designed with participation as the core experience from the very beginning. There must be real interaction throughout the learning experience in a course, not just a discussion forum added at the end of a module.
Start With The Learning Experience, Not The Platform
Too many online learning environments consist of a variety of features such as video lectures, quizzes, forums, and so on. Many learning management systems contain a host of different features which are turned on by teachers, but which add no value to the student’s learning experience and therefore are largely unused by students.
Instead ask yourself the following simple question: What will students be able to do after completing this lesson that they were not able to do before?
The use of short writing tasks such as identifying claims in a text, evaluating evidence in support of a conclusion, and revising students’ own academic writing for example, in addition to the use of peer review, annotated examples, and feedback of all sorts, allows for a deep understanding of how to conduct academic argument. This, in addition to teaching students the habits of good planning, good drafting, and good revision, can help to alleviate some of the stress and anxiety that comes with the pressure to complete assignments on time. Students searching for help with academic support with phrases such as write my paper for me can be directed to support such as this instead.
An effective online learning environment is not simply a translation of a physical classroom to online. Rather, it is an environment intentionally and carefully designed to include all of the elements a teacher would use in a classroom and delivered in a specific sequence to learners. Thus, a 50-minute lecture in a physical classroom is not translated to a 50-minute online video. Rather, such a lecture might be delivered in 12 minutes or so of explanation, followed by a number of short activities, such as a self-check or worked example, and then, for example, a short group activity that learners complete online in order to put the material into practice.
Shorter. Sharper. More active.
Use Active Learning As The Default
Much has been written on how students learn best, particularly in terms of teaching research. As mentioned previously, the Teaching Commons from Stanford University is a great place to start in looking for ways to move students from simple reception of information to one of deeper understanding through analysis, application and reflection. Online teaching and learning poses unique challenges to this end, since students have such easy access to simply watching pre-recorded lectures.
While some students may thrive in an environment where they can speak with the instructor and other students face-to-face, others may be equally engaged by writing, drawing, taking polls, coding, problem solving, creating and watching videos, and even leaving comments on shared documents. The key is to have students make decisions, test hypotheses, and receive feedback of varying types.
Here are five simple things to try to increase student interaction in your online class:
Quick activities during video lectures - Pause the video every few minutes and ask students to answer a poll, predict the outcome of a situation, or write down a one-liner summary of what they just learned in the video.
Use retrieval practice. Students are presented with a number of questions about what they have read in class. This is not just a repeat of their notes, but allows them to demonstrate their knowledge of the material and for the instructor to gauge their understanding.
Let students work with messy examples. Students can critique bad thesis statements, help to debug faulty calculations, and suggest ways to better design a survey.
Quick Peer to Peer feedback. Students compare answers to questions within 3 minutes of each other and instructor reviews answers to question posed to the whole class shortly thereafter.
End the course with an exit response. This can be a simple question to clarify any misunderstandings, something unexpected in the course, or how to apply what was learned in other situations.
Some activities are simpler than they read. Repeating a small number of simple activities again and again creates stronger online interactivity than trying to pack one massive activity for online interactivity. This doesn’t mean to rule out trying to pack one massive activity for online interactivity.
Make Live Sessions Worth Attending
Most students will choose to watch a recording rather than sit through a live session if they can get the same value from doing so. This is not to say that the students are lazy but rather that they are managing their time rationally.
Online live sessions have to provide something different than recordings of sessions. Live sessions can include conversations, immediate feedback, problem solving, coaching and even the energy created by people working together online. Turning a presentation into a screen-shared slideshow and reading it out loud in a live session is not worth holding the session online.
After a brief review of material from previous sessions, use a poll to elicit different perspectives from students. Next, use breakout groups for students to work on a case study related to material from previous sessions. Have them report back to the entire class and address patterns that he or she sees in students’ responses.
Incorporate breakout rooms thoughtfully. Sometimes students will be thrown into silent groups to ‘discuss’ a reading. Provide them with a clear task, a time frame, and a way to see each other’s work (e.g. to present to the larger class). An example of a good use of a breakout room would be to have students choose the best evidence from an article and then be prepared to defend their choice within 4 minutes.
Assigning roles can help too. One student summarizes. One challenges assumptions. One reports back. Keep it light, but make participation concrete.
Build Community Before You Need It
In the classroom, students are more likely to participate when they feel noticed. In physical spaces, teachers can create moments to recognize students throughout the day. Online spaces require more intention.
A presence of a human instructor online is needed to create a community in an online class.
As instructor, you can make a two-minute video introduction to your students instead of posting an announcement for them to read. You can have students write down one question that they have before the course starts and have them introduce themselves to each other in small groups that will stay together for several weeks and then give them feedback with their name and a specific observation rather than just a number.
The U.S. Department of Education did a good review of online learning research. Online learning is effective in terms of student learning when students have time to work online and have opportunities for interaction. This last point is key: technology does not automatically equal learning. Designed engagement is key.
Students also need space for informal interaction. A discussion area within a course where students can post questions, share resources, or write about ideas for study tips is useful. There should be minimal structure to such spaces. Occasional prompts like “What took longest this week?” can also be very useful.
Give Feedback Faster, Not Only Bigger
When it comes to online learning, it’s easy for students to get lost in cyberspace for days at a time without realizing it. By the time you finally grade that major assignment, the time for learning that has long since passed.
The more frequent the feedback, the better. This can include automated quizzes for basic understanding, peer review comments on alternative ways of solving a problem, audio notes from the instructor for quick comments that wouldn’t need to be as long as written comments, and rubrics for feedback on submissions before they are graded for a full letter grade.
Feedback for online learners should answer three important questions: Where am I? What do I need to improve? What should I do next?
Be selective in your feedback. Instead of writing a lengthy explanation of every error that a student made, be able to identify two changes that the student needs to make in order to improve the most. For example, if a student’s research paper had problems with a vague thesis statement and weak source integration, the feedback on that paper would start with those two issues and then move on to talk about any instances of improper formatting.
Design For Attention And Energy
Designing for online learning means taking into account all of the other demands that students are juggling, including work, family, other classes, and more.
Don’t make your students read a long module. Unhidden, complete and clear instructions for what you expect from your students for any task (including online discussions) are much more important than good multimedia. Powerful layout and clear due dates for assignments that are published in only three places help to keep students on track too.
Organizing a course for online learning is similar to organizing a course for on-campus learning. The biggest difference is that students online will need more help organizing their time and managing their learning. The simplest weekly structure for online courses is: Overview, Materials, Practice, Assignment, Feedback.
For online learning multimedia needs to be used with restraint. Videos are best for tone, for demonstration, for a particular sequence of points. Text is best for long detailed descriptions. Diagrams are better than text for showing relationships. Audio can be useful for self study recordings for example for listening or for language practice for example for discussion of reflections.
In online education design, removal of superfluous elements is key. Remove excessive reading from students. Break up long lectures into smaller chunks. Instead of one big assignment, design two smaller ones that are submitted at different times.
Make Assessment Feel Like Learning
For online learning, assessment is often considered the most ‘transactional’ part of a course – i.e. students do work, teachers grade work, and then both parties move on from the course.
Rather than viewing assessments solely as test attempts or final written projects that determine students’ end grades, teach students to gain insight from low-stakes attempts and from stages of completing a writing assignment.
A real learning task on the web looks different. Authentic learning tasks are set up to engage students to complete meaningful work for genuine reasons that have relevance to their lives and learning goals. Online, such as a business student analyzing a company’s customer complaints over time, a nursing student responding to a patient’s needs, or a history student creating a digital exhibit with primary sources to tell a historical story and present it to an audience, for example.
These same measures can improve academic integrity too. Generic written assignments often elicit generic written work. Assignments that connect in some meaningful way to what you have been doing in class for the last week or so, with clearly stated specific goals for each stage of completion, prompt work that is unique to each student’s skills and circumstances.
Choose Tools That Serve Behavior
The least obtrusive yet most useful technologies for online learning are probably shared documents, polls, short quizzes and other interactive materials as well as a number of annotation tools and online discussion platforms.
Before adding more tools to the set of tools you already use, consider the behavior that each tool can elicit in your students.
● Polls are great to find out quickly if students have any misconceptions and for shy students to be able to participate as well.
● Collaborative documents enable students to co-create visible results in group work tasks.
● Annotation tools: Reading becomes a collaborative task, rather than something students have to do on their own.
● Short video or audio responses which are used in order to train students to explain what they have read in academic texts, in oral presentations, to work with language.
● Progress dashboards for managing time and learning in a self-paced environment.
It’s best to stick to a few simple tools for online learning. This means avoiding courses that require students to log in to multiple systems in order to complete a single lesson. Instead, find a few simple and effective tools and use them throughout the course.
Train Students To Learn Online
Most learners will be expected to work online at some stage, yet few will have been taught how to do so effectively. That’s got to be unfair to them.
The same set of skills required for online learning – planning, monitoring, communicating, and organizing – that instructors rely on are also skills that students need to learn in order to succeed in the instructor’s online course. The reason that students who are late with assignments are not careless is that they have not yet organized their work for the week into manageable pieces of time.
A good model for how to study online is to model practical study habits for students to mimic. This can include reading out the module for the week, estimating how long an assignment will take, and even blocking time in their calendar to watch videos and do tasks online. It can also include asking students to submit a study plan before a major piece of work is due.
Every little bit of instruction that models practical habits for studying online is good. This might mean showing students how to read through the weekly module online, how long an assignment is likely to take to complete, and how to plan out studying for tasks that require completion of a number of online activities. In addition to these kinds of strategies for studying, asking students to submit a study plan before a major project is also useful.
Keep Improving The Course While It Runs
Much of what is taught online is constantly being fine-tuned by the instructor in real time. Thus, if in the middle of the course half the students misunderstand a key point or written instruction, the entire matter can be rewritten instantly online.
Feedback, whether from students, peers, or even administrators, is often best when it is collected mid-course. For one, there is still time to make good on the feedback before the course is over. Moreover, it is far easier to incorporate suggestions and observations about the current module than it would be to try to make changes for the next at the end of the current one. Just as importantly, responding visibly and thoughtfully to feedback along the way helps to build trust with your students.
Online learning is effective when students are engaged in activities that allow them to practice, question, edit and connect with others. It needs to have structure without being rigid and flexibility without a lack of direction.
Interactivity is not about increasing the quantity of online activities. It’s about making learning harder to ignore.