So: I work in online and blended education- but the specific courses I work with/on are all part of multi-course programs, and as such, retention is very, very high. But these are focused programs aimed at graduate level students, and that’s a whole different ball of wax.
I’d say that online learning is really not for everyone. It’s useful if you’re super busy with life and still need to crank out a degree or certification or something, but if you’re a hard core extrovert or need that face to face attention with an instructor, online (even really well thought out online) isn’t for you. Also: not all online education is well thought out. So there’s that.
4 Likes
Yes.
My degree is specifically in Teaching (and not, I’d point out, the more theoretical Education). As a result, I had 900 hours of mentored coaching in in-class presence, and lots of drills/exercises/etc on what we’d call “classroom management.” That’s about managing the classroom, which has as it’s base the control of the focus of the room.
Some degree of this is pretty normal in advanced degrees aimed at classroom teachers (k-12); the extent I went through far exceeded the norm. Lucky that way.
I also have a strong desire to be good at teaching- I view the entire classroom thing as a bit of performance art. I’m using every tool at my disposal to modulate and manage the tone/timbre of the learning space to provide the highest odds of a positive outcome for students. Not everybody, I’ve learned, feels or functions this way.
7 Likes
I suspect this is the problem a lot of the time. I don’t think distance learning works for graduate courses, due to their discursive nature. Fumbling around every time you need to make a comment wrecks the flow.
5 Likes
I’ve participated in some grad courses on-line. A friend of mine did a mix of in-person and on-line with his grad students, and asked me and a few other friends working in IT to participate on the discussion board and give him feedback on the software (the students knew we would be showing up and interacting; the class was on literature wed read and studied as undergrads so we could keep up).
I think the key thing about on-line discussions, just like in-person classroom discussions, is establishing the culture. There seems to be this lingering perception that things will just work (or else never work at all). My own experience from when I was training on-line is that students need to be invited to participate and expectations need to be set, same as in a physical classroom setting.
5 Likes
From the learner side: I tend to doze off watching lecture and “explain” videos. Even documentaries like Cosmos make me doze. What can be done to combat this?
3 Likes
Even so, I find it really hard when you have tiny people on a screen, and you can’t really read body language to jump in or not. I think to some extent, better teleconferencing software, like Zoom or Blue Jeans, alleviates that problem because you can use the /hand command to flag a moderator that you’d like to say something. If the course is wholly online, that seems to work well. I’ve taken a couple remote courses where there was an instructor physically in a room on a campus with students, and then there were also remote students. That type of set-up really requires someone to be monitoring the online participants full-time. And at the point where you’re paying two faculty to team teach … why not just pay two people to run two in-person classes?
I don’t mean to be totally down on online learning. I’ve just never really seen it deployed (at the grad level) with both clarity of purpose (Why should this class be online?) and any sort of expertise at the challenges of online learning. Hopefully more people like @nothingfuture can fix that.
3 Likes
There’s actual empirical research about this, and here’s what it says:
- Lectures should be segmented into short chunks- 6 minutes each is the most commonly cited cut off of length.
- We don’t need to see the instructor the whole time- but we do need to see them a bit. Sometimes a face is a good use of pixels; sometimes it isn’t.
- Most slides that get used are garbage. It if can’t be read from the screen of my smartphone, the slide is wrong.
- Everybody gets told to speak slowly and carefully- for classroom speaking. But the research indicates the words-per-minute of a video can be very, very high. Machine gun style is the way to go.
- Closed captioning (and text transcripts) are a must, for a lot of reasons.
- Animations can sometimes really, really help. They cost a fortune to have good ones made.
8 Likes
Obviously, I’m going to disagree here. But, as I said before: online learning (at whatever level) is not for everybody.
We always aim to build our courses to be as asynchronous as possible- my feeling is that much of the reason that people take online courses is they need to time shift them (because jobs, or family, or whatever). That’s a choice some people aren’t into, though, as it means there’s very little real time person to person contact. And that’s not for everyone.
And that’s ok, obviously.
7 Likes
You know? I have never taken, nor given (and I used to do a lot of on-line corporate training) a course with teleprescence/video. Never. And yet I’ve taken, and given, some courses that turned out amazingly well, including one where all the students were in India, I was in Canada, and we used MS Messenger because that was the only real-time communication tool we could all use.
I’ve found voice/conference calls useful, and I like a visual focus, but make it a slide or a whiteboard or the lecturer, not everyone else.
Look at this site. For most of us the only physical descriptions we have are provided via text, but the culture makes it work.
5 Likes
So let me ask a clarifying question: Do you think online learning can work for courses with a heavy emphasis on verbal discussion? I ask because you keep framing this as a choice:
But the school I’m at does require certain courses to have a verbal component. Some courses fill that with a public speaking assignment, some fulfill it with a more consistent expectation of verbal contribution throughout the course. I do both in my course. In my graduate program, it was considered good to have students learn to speak, and debate, and learn to make a point in a discussion. Do you think you can develop those skills in an online class?
Which works for a recreational discourse. Depending on the goals of the course, that may or may not be sufficient.
3 Likes
So it’s not just Carl Sagan’s dreamy voice?
4 Likes
I guess my answer, especially in the context of androgogy, is that good academic discourse feels like recreational discourse as it’s conducted.
4 Likes
I just can’t agree that verbal skills are unimportant. I work with a lot of students who come in as transfers or come in really unprepared from high school, and can’t do something like say what they mean out loud and support it with facts. Or respond in real time to a comment that someone else made, using facts. Even though the learners are adults, I do think that developing those skills is important. While digital communication is becoming more common, I don’t see the need to verbally speak to someone clearly and directly going away in my lifetime.
Even if I did agree with that point, I do have to assign verbal credit for the course I’m teaching now.
3 Likes
There are course and formats that does not, really (as of yet) work online. That’ll change to some degree as we go on, but there clearly limits. Chemistry classes with a lab component, as an obvious example.
That said, it’s pretty easy for faculty and students to be able to swap video and audio back and forth. And while I focus on asynchronous classes, there are plenty of synchronous classes that do just fine. I’ve worked with a number of online foreign languages courses that made copious use of real-time video conferencing and get excellent reviews.
Again, I work at an elite university that charges substantial money for these courses, so there is every incentive for a student to push through (as opposed, let’s say, to a low-cost MOOC or the like). That likely plays in, too.
So: can it work? Yes, depending. Should it be used for everything/everyone? No. Does the tech continue to enable more and more flexibility in instruction? Yes. Are there (apparent) limits to that? Yes.
Devil/god is in the details.
4 Likes
Nobody said they weren’t important.
Course delivery and design are always constrained by educational goals and available resources. If the only available medium is on-line and you want to foster/inculcate verbal skills, you’re going to have to find software that will let you do that and plan accordingly.
But you were mentioning body language, which means it’s not just verbal skills (and as someone who’s taught blind and deaf people I would never lump those as one thing). Otherwise you could happily hold discussions over VoIP conference calls and be done with.
If on-line is still mandatory for delivery but you want readable body language, you’re going to have to limit discussion group size and break everyone into smaller groups, maybe even set up separate tutorials.
If you have to have large groups of people discussing things at once (and I’d question that, because large groups of people inhibit cogent discussion, but okay, let’s say that’s a constraint too), but also have readable body language… wait, why is this on-line again?
On-line is wonderful for discussions not happening in real time, for self-directed learning, for long distance education, and for presentations which will be recorded and played back later. They are not a panacea.
As holding a small-group tutorial in a 500-seat lecture hall is inappropriate, so jamming all educational outcomes into an on-line format without thought for how the medium will affect delivery is inappropriate. It is not the medium’s fault if it gets selected to do what it’s not made for.
7 Likes
I figured this was going to be the answer.
And I was trying to find the limits of where that utility is, based on previous times I’ve seen distance learning fail.
this has been an immensely frustrating discussion. I was trying to find out the limits of what this type of learning is good or useful for. So I asked about the obvious edge case, and a case where I’ve had online learning fail on me: the case in which verbal feedback is necessary. This is all hypothetical to me. I don’t need to take classes anymore, and the university I’m working at isn’t considering adding online courses.
From the poster’s replies, it seems that the key to making this work is to be at an elite university where students pay a huge amount of money for the class. It’s very frustrating to have your specific discussions of instruction (i.e., discussion seems to work well with advanced video conferencing technologies, two instructors, etc from this comment) met with “well, I’m at an elite university and we get good reviews so 🤷,” and “well, it doesn’t work for everything.” It’s like honest discourse simply isn’t valued around here anymore.
2 Likes
I’d say that’s a poor take-away, and completely inaccurate if taken from any of my comments.
I was at a corporation with the only tools available to me the ones that were a) free/already licenced and b) met our security standards. There wasn’t a big list to work through.
Before that I was in a public school system that had no budget and no desire for anything new. Our then-government had declared they were “creating a crisis” in education and had removed a lot of funding, all the while questioning any curriculum that didn’t match their political views.
A lot of on-line training success, as with any training, comes from the tone-setting. If you just dump people into a session with software they’ve never used before, in a setting they’ve never experienced before, it’s going to be a disaster.
And if you walk out of such a disaster thinking, “ooh, this on-line stuff isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, it’s so limited”, then you’ve got some learning to do. If you don’t have training resources available to you, you’re going to have to problem-solve. I’d run what I called rehearsals, asking colleagues to run a session in the background on their machines, not participating, while I figured out scenarios.
That’s all on the person doing the teaching, not the students. What did you do to make the students comfortable? What did you do to provide opportunities for the expected outcomes to be achieved? Hint: if you’re not comfortable on-line, the students won’t be, even if they’ve done on-line before.
3 Likes
I was going to leave this part alone until this last comment. You seem upset when people who have trained successfully on-line explain the constraints under which on-line learning is successful.
How is that dishonest? All educational methodologies have trade-offs, including very traditional ones. The “stand and deliver” lecture hall has been shown time and again to be a not-great way to educate, but it’s traditional and entire buildings are designed for it, so we use it anyway and work within its constraints.
I’m finding your replies frustrating because it feels like you just don’t believe us, because you’ve had bad experiences with on-line and seem to believe that’s all there is.
3 Likes
No, this is from the other poster.
My problem is that he’s not explaining those constraints. I’ve brought up a couple things that I think are issues, and technologies that I’ve seen improve them. Nothingfuture replied by saying that it’s a preference to have a verbal component of a class. Which … OK, in some classes it probably is. But if, say, an entire curriculum is moved online, that will mean that for courses that do have a verbal component, there are, in my view, substantial roadblocks. So I pushed a little more on that point and got back this response:
Again, I work at an elite university that charges substantial money for these courses, so there is every incentive for a student to push through (as opposed, let’s say, to a low-cost MOOC or the like).
That’s not a helpful reply. That’s a reply that closes the discourse to anyone who is at a public school, or a community college, or a SLAC. If that’s the goal, to leave 99% of the educators in the country out of the discussion … I mean, obviously everyone has their own motivations. My motivation is to serve the students I have, and to understand educational technologies that might help them. Obviously, this reply helps me do that, in the sense that it tells me that synchronous online learning couldn’t be successfully implemented at a non-elite university. But it’s sort of unsatisfying in the sense that I’m genuinely interested to hear about the technologies that make it possible, and I’m being told that the problem is not being at an elite university.
1 Like
I also work as an instructional designer creating online training. I’ve stayed out of this thread because it’s not my AMA, but it seems like this is developing into a discussion about online training, so I’ll contribute and then if we want to break this off into its own separate thread, I’d definitely be interested.
I design online training for a big corporation. Due to a lot of limitations of that company’s software, security requirements, needing to verify that people took classes for their job requirements, and time restrictions, we tend to make a lot of slide based training. For the more sales oriented courses, or the higher level product launches, we add a lot of videos - both animated and with people demoing products or discussing them.
I am also developing courses for my own company, and in that case I have had the freedom to explore a lot more options for how we deliver courses, and also interviewed a lot of people about the benefit to them of online training.
Here are the benefits I have heard:
- A lot of people would rather not travel, or cannot travel. Travel is expensive, and a lot of people would prefer to spend the money they would have spend on air fare and hotels on another course. Many people have little kids or family situations that prevent them from traveling. There’s a lot of people who have social anxiety or just don’t enjoy travel, too.
- People have schedules/family obligations that make it hard for them to get away for a whole weekend for a workshop, or to a class that is during the day. They want to take the classes when it’s convenient for them.
- Some people have learning disabilities or are not native English speakers. Videos that they can start and stop work better for them than a live lecture.
- Then there’s the opportunity to study with a teacher who otherwise is not available to you.
Because my own company is yoga and healing based, I’m really exploring ways to create as much community and sense of connection as I can in my courses, and a lot of the corporate issues of verifying that people attend are just not as big of a deal for these courses.
What I’ve learned from my conversations is:
- Zoom videoconference is by far the closest thing to being in person with someone. However, for people who live in other time zones, this gets into some of the same issues as live classes, that people need to be able to be on at a certain time. Yes, you can watch the replay, but it’s not the same as a live call.
- People like Facebook groups and online forums for group interaction.
The drop out rate from online courses is very high - something like 80% of courses are never completed.
One thing that keeps people involved is paying a lot of money for the course, and also having a Facebook group or community component to it.
Here’s some articles about this issue:
One of the best designed communities that revolves around online learning is this one, WPElevation, which teaches people to become professional WordPress developers. In this video, they discuss the tech that is involved in this system. It is super clever and thought through to create community and engagement through rewards and emails. This kind of thing is rarely thought through - people throw the content up and do not think about followup and delivery.
I’m current in an online “coaching program” and I am super impressed with how they run this program. It is not technically very advanced - mostly just documents thrown up in Google Docs and Zoom videoconference calls + a Facebook group - by the teachers are very high touch; constantly checking in, reaching out by Facebook messenger to see how they can help, they just gave me an extra $1000 bonus of coaching (this is like 1 hour call - these coaches tend to massively inflate the value of their work in order to get paid a reasonable amount) - so it’s not always about the tech but also can be about personally getting out there and checking in. If you watch this video all the way through, you’ll see that this company was doing something similar at first, then as they grew they automated some of the personal touch elements.
5 Likes