Well, here we are. As I write this blog, many of you are into your second week of eLearning (with some in their third week) even though you swore you would never engage in online education. I get it. I do.
NY Times – 03/17/2020
As an early adopter (I taught my first online class in 1997 on WebCT at the University of Northern Colorado as a Grad assistant), I have had to defend the medium for 23-years. To many, eLearning will never be more than the bastard-child of “real” learning, meaning face-to-face learning will always “trump” (no pun intended) any other kind.
And yet, here we are.
So, let’s talk brass tax. Let’s talk about how to make the best of a bad situation. (After all, doesn’t it seem that’s what it really means to be an adult? To make the best choice from only bad choices? Sigh…) Let’s talk about how to do this thing in some meaningful ways. And seeing as we are likely going to keep using online / remote learning for the foreseeable future, let’s start to iterate now!
1. Without the apologetics of a full on defense, let me urge you to consider some shifts in the mental game. I won’t belabor the point other than to say that there are HUNDREDS (possibly thousands) of articles showing that eLearning is not worse than face-to-face instruction. Unfortunately, there have been a healthy number of professors who, after attempting online instruction, wrote blistering or scathing indictments of the modality, relegating it to 2nd class citizen. For some, it’s a matter of misrepresenting or misinterpretting research or other editorials (see this recent example which is ripe with misinterpretation possibilities). But in reality, most of those editorials were written by people who did it….well, they did it wrong. They asked bad questions like, “I do X in my classroom, how do I do X online?” That is the wrong question! They often tried eLearning techniques that were simplistic or made bad assumptions about audience or process. They didn’t take full advantage of the richness, depth, and breadth of the world wide web, relying many times on a single strategy or tool to overcome bad pedagogy / andragogy. So, my first plea to you is that you might start to open your mind to some other possibilities. It may save your sanity as we’re likely to be here for a few years…
One last quick note. Part of the problem with the question, “How do I transfer my F2F instruction “as is” to my online instruction” is this. Face to face instruction throughout higher ed is generally not great, at least as far as actual learning is concerned. I know that’s a hard pill to swallow for some, but it’s true. And it’s proven out through decades of rigorous research. If you’re interested in going down that road, here are two of the best resources to show you what I mean. (IF you read these, come back to this blog to find some great resources about how to do it “right.”) Check out the criticisms spelled out in detail by (professor) Dr. Bryan Caplan in, “The Case Against Education” and then follow it up with Brown’s, “Make It Stick.”
2. Forget the overwhelming desire to create hours of video content – live or asynchronous. In fact, as my friend Tanya Joosten points out in a recent tweet, “The research tells us that synchronous (real time) web conferencing (and a lot of experience) is not good for online learning, but I feel like everyone is suggesting to their faculty going remote to — do synchronous web conferencing. ???“ As a researcher of more than 20 years, Tanya has packed a lot of data into that sound bite. But the key take-aways are this:
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Asynchronous discussions are the best methodology for real learning in the online environment;
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video instruction has a place, but videos should not be more than about 7 minutes in length;
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asking students to defend, debate, or logically walk through an argument is FAR superior to watching a teacher do those things and even superior to multiple choice tests or quizzes on those same subjects.
The good news? You don’t have to spend dozens (hundreds?) of hours creating that kind of content!
3. Check-in with your students. What students who like eLearning (or whom have acclimated to it, due to pragmatic life events) desire is contact. This does not mean live contact. It means that you check in regularly to guide, influence, question, support, etc. It means putting up thoughts / views / questions and more in that discussion, rather than just allowing students to roam free, treating what should be a conversational discussion like a posting forum instead. In fact, here is one area where eLearning beats face-to-face instruction. Not only does research back this up, my 22 years of online instruction reinforces this. In a F2F class, you have wallflowers, communication dominators, shy kids, and more. That equates to classroom conversations (assuming you have them) that are often quite lopsided. But in an online discussion, EVERY student has a voice. So, assuming you have required their participation (which you should – 3-5 total posts; with one as a response to the topic, followed by cited responses to their peers, taking place throughout the week), you will get to (literally) see which students “get it” and which students do not….in near-real time.
But in addition to the pragmatics of your subject, don’t hesitate to check-in with your students in ways that are just plain supportive. Our institute is dedicated to “interconnecting” the educational experience. If you’d like to peruse past blogs about the crucial nature of socio-emotional connection, please do! But suffice it to say that your students will do far better if you take moments here or there to ask how they are feeling, how they are doing, and what they are struggling with.
4. Don’t shy away from collaboration. Just because the medium is online, doesn’t mean students cannot learn how to collaborate in this context. One plus – it helps you concentrate your efforts and may be a far more meaningful way to do video-conferencing if that is your plan. Another plus – students will likely graduate into a world where this exact kind of work is performed regularly, so you are giving them a leg up.
Just be sure to help them through it all – every phase. Don’t simply create groups (or worse, allow the LMS to create groups for you) and then give them a task saying, “Good luck!” Remember, our students have NEVER been taught how to be a good group member. They have never been taught what it means to make a group into a team. They have never been taught about team leadership, the importance of gatekeepers, the value of revision specialists, or the importance of a project manager, despite the fact that 99% of groups in business use require these things! So use this opportunity to help them with these life-skills that they will use throughout much of their adult lives. Grab a free instance of Trello or some other project management software and have your students leverage it for the collaborative projects you give. That way you can SEE every single aspect of the group experience. Who owned what, when it was due, and what domino effect late work had. No more, “he said / she said” about how bad a group was. It’s all in black and white.
5. Create a virtual office. Are you sick of answering the same question(s) over and over again? Create a virtual office (just a discussion called that) where students can both post AND see questions (and your responses). That way you get to answer questions once with the benefit of everyone seeing them. (Yes, you may have to tell students you already answered that question until they get used to the idea.) Obviously make sure you tell students that personal questions can still be sent to your email, but if someone sends you a process question, tell them you’ll answer it in the office area!
I know seven is the magic number for remembering, but I’m going to stop at five today. These five recommendations could help you with time / efficiency while helping your students with outcomes, but they also may mean a bit of a pivot from your current thinking. And as we all know, pivots take energy, resources, and probably a different allocation of time. So five will suffice today.
I hope you are all starting to get into the swing of eLearning. As #1 suggests, you may find that you actually enjoy seeing what students think, being able to swoop in as a devil’s advocate (my favorite discussion tactic) or a consultant and really help a person work through a problem or idea.
So, virus or no virus, let’s do this. Let’s help students not just get their “class time” in, let’s help them learn.
Good luck and good learning.