Online Learning, Only Better

Improving the Online Learning Experience for Students

By Holly A. Bell

(Note: This article was originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education on 1 October 2012)

I truly believe that most of my full-time, tenure-track colleagues would rather quit their jobs than teach an online course. And that’s a shame, since they are exactly the people who should be helping to set standards for meaningful online education.

My colleagues’ concerns about the quality of online education could largely be overcome if more such courses were taught by talented and experienced professors known for excellence in face-to-face delivery. Some of the best learning experiences are student-centered, not faculty-centered. I realize that this requires us to let go of the idea that the three hours of weekly lectures we deliver in face-to-face courses add significant value to student learning.

We need to get over ourselves. We have created passive students who never crack a book and don’t know how to learn. Faculty members complain about lack of student motivation, yet continue to use the same methods expecting different results. A well-designed, student-centered online course can improve student learning and teach students life skills across a much broader spectrum than a face-to-face course ever could. I think every student should be required to take at least one online course as part of his or her formal education.

Reading L. Dee Fink’s book Creating Significant Learning Experiences (Jossey-Bass, 2003) inspired me to develop my first online course, in finance. I now do half of my teaching online, including courses in finance, economics, and business. While Fink’s book has nothing to do with online learning, it has a lot to say about effective teaching. I was struck by how well the book’s “Taxonomy of Significant Learning”—a list of six significant learning principles that he believes should be part of every course—and the idea of student-driven learning environments fit within the framework of online education. (For those who have not read the book, the six principles are foundational knowledge, application, integration, human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn.)

Fink’s book, along with my own evolution as a professor teaching both online and face-to-face courses, led me to seek out ways to bring the dynamic nature of a traditional classroom to the virtual environment. Here are some lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Community can be created online. A shared sense of community arises naturally in a face-to-face class as students form study groups and friendships. In the virtual environment this is more difficult, but not impossible. My students are required to complete weekly work and are allowed, but not required, to collaborate. I have a weekly discussion board that serves as a homework forum in which students can ask questions and share resources. I let students discuss the homework and help one another for several days, and usually by Friday I post my own nudges, resources, and words of encouragement if they are moving in the right direction. By doing this as a group, students benefit from collective knowledge and the instructor’s comments. They create a learning community.

Letting the students “own” the discussion boards helps them build community. In addition to the homework forum, they must discuss a weekly question in groups of five to seven students. While I monitor the boards once or twice a day to ensure polite discussion is taking place, I stay out of it. This space belongs to students, and lets them explore ideas and perhaps even reach consensus. Discussion questions are exploratory in nature (“What are some factors that might contribute to … “) rather than specific.

Students need to know you are there. Students taking online courses often complain that they feel they are submitting work into a void, to some faceless professor who doesn’t care about them. One solution is to humanize the instructor through videos. I start by posting an introductory video in which I cover the course’s syllabus, expectations, structure, and all other information I would cover on the first day of a face-to-face class. I follow up with weekly “recap” videos in which I review key points of the previous week’s material, go over any problems that students struggled with, and comment on discussion-board threads I enjoyed. These “mini lecture” videos are generally no more than 10 minutes long. The great thing about online courses is that they allow me to home in on areas where students might be having difficulty rather than the concepts they easily understand on their own. Even though the communication is one-way, students often comment on how much they enjoyed the time with the instructor.

Students want feedback. Students complain that many online courses are designed around reading assignments, and a midterm and final exam. Until they fail the midterm, they have no idea they haven’t learned the material. A weekly quiz assignment with 10 to 15 questions allows students to self-check their understanding. They enter their answers online and immediately receive their grade. They know instantly how they are doing, and I can discuss learning deficiencies in my weekly video or individually with students.

But students will resist giving feedback. After the midterm exam in my traditional classes, I usually initiate a discussion about how the class is going and how lectures, discussions, and test reviews could be improved. I quickly learned that this doesn’t work well in online classes. While students in traditional classes get to know (and hopefully trust) the professor, distance students don’t have a similar opportunity. Asking them to comment in a private e-mail just doesn’t work.

I deal with the feedback problem by building a midcourse reflection into the discussion questions. I ask students to consider several questions about the course, what they’ve learned about their learning styles, and at least one thing they like and don’t like about it. I also ask them to comment on at least one other student’s reflection. In my weekly recap video I talk about any improvements I plan to make, but I also explain why I might not change something that students don’t like.

I also incorporate a private, end-of-course reflection in which I ask six questions, based on Fink’s learning taxonomy. For example, “Tell me how you have learned to apply the concepts discussed in class.” The purpose is to determine whether the course has touched each of the significant learning experiences.

While many colleges are content to leave online courses to adjunct professors or distance-education divisions, the lack of participation by experienced educators truly diminishes the potential of such courses and weakens standards of consistency between traditional and online education. Don’t get me wrong: On a small campus like mine, located in rural Alaska, having talented adjunct instructors who live outside our region teach online courses is a major asset. But if academic departments don’t set quality or content standards to ensure parity with face-to-face classes, the student experience will be negative. A well-articulated set of standards would also take pressure off faculty members to develop online courses from scratch. If we give them a template, they can start with that and improve on it (and personalize it) over time.

Many of us chose to become professors because of a love of learning. Yet it is easy for us to become complacent and use the teaching methods we learned years or even decades ago. Raised in traditional classrooms, we are comfortable with traditional methods. But students have made it clear that they want greater accessibility and no longer think of education as something that happens exclusively within the four walls of a classroom. We have a responsibility to determine how our students learn best—and that requires us to engage in learning ourselves.

Holly A. Bell is a business professor and experienced author, analyst, manager, and blogger who lives in the Mat-Su Valley of Alaska. You can visit her website at www.professorhollybell.com or follow her on Twitter @HollyBell8.

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online learning image courtesy of renjith krishnan