Flexibility & Convenience
Flexibility and convenience are two of the most important deciding factors students use when choosing between online learning and traditional classroom instruction. An online learning or hybrid learning environment gives students more flexibility than a traditional classroom. In a physical classroom, students are typically expected to attend class and take tests at a specific time and location. Online courses allow students to attend a lecture from home and complete a test, assignment, or quiz by a certain deadline — removing the need for both a location and time restriction. Because the work can be done asynchronously, students can complete the course material on their own time so they can have more time for other classes, their job, and family responsibilities.
According to the 2022 Voice of the Online Learner, nearly 60% of students opt for online education because they don’t have to go to campus, at least not consistently. Most online students reported they prefer an asynchronous (69%) and fully online program with no required campus visits (79%). This allows students to learn at their own pace. Instead of sitting through an hour-long synchronous lecture, students are able to pace their own learning — speeding up or spending more time on materials as needed.
Meet the Need: Focus on Enabling Asynchronous
Further, Mckinsey surveyed more than 7,000 students in 17 countries to find out which elements of online higher education they valued most. Of 11 online learning features, students identified these as the top three: recording classes & instruction and making them available to watch later, easy access to online study materials, and timing flexibility that enables students to work and study.
Other asynchronous learning activities could include recorded videos, reading and research projects, course discussions, problem-solving exercises, and peer reviews that require student-to-student feedback. However, when you enable learning that is this flexible, you’ll need to plan ahead — and you guessed it, provide resources, guidance, and clear deadlines in order to keep students on track.
Clear Guidance & Support
Even online, the basics still matter…and probably all the more for online students. Features that have always informed a traditional learning experience, such as timely content, course structure, and guidance are non-negotiable.
Students in 16 of the 17 countries surveyed by McKinsey said that having a very well-organized online course with a clear path and a step-by-step guide to achieving their goals was among their five most important elements.
You know best that students, in general, don’t plan well, and many of your online students may have never taken an online course. Students coming into your course will each have a different level of requisite knowledge and experience. How you set the stage for your course will impact students’ success.
Meet the Need: Provide a Clear Roadmap
Providing clear expectations and guidance for how and when to complete course activities is important. So consider the first few days of your online course an opportunity to set them on the right path:
- Remind students how and where to find course material, and explain how that material aligns with the objectives of the course.
- Keep due dates for important assignments top of students’ minds and make sure a syllabus and online rubric tied to the course’s learning outcomes are highly visible.
- Anticipate potential questions from students and prepare a quick FAQ resource — especially helpful for students new to taking online courses.
- Keep yourself available through chat, email, or virtual office hours — and actively invite each student to participate in a video check-in with you.
- Use multimedia and annotation tools to share ongoing feedback with students so they have an opportunity to improve for the next lesson.
Consider all the quick, one-off questions, tips, and on-the-spot feedback you provide to students during your in-person classes. Online students don’t have the same access to you, and because of that, support needs to be intentional and plentiful.
Plus, you can use tools like an online discussion and collaboration suite to make content delivery, evaluation, and providing feedback easier. With tools like this, you can focus your time on giving quality ongoing feedback to help students improve, which is proven to motivate students to continue engaging. As an added bonus, you can also leverage assessment analytics in those tools, which help you identify students who may be falling behind in certain areas — giving you the opportunity to provide an extra layer of guidance that gets them back on track.
Engaging Learning Activities
While many of your learning activities may be asynchronous to better support your online students, that doesn’t mean some of the high-impact practices often found in traditional classroom instruction are off the table. In that same McKinsey study, one of the main hesitations students cited about enrolling in fully online courses was “getting bored if the learning experience is not motivating.”
Many students want an online learning experience comparable to that of the in-person experience, which means you’ll have to create a learning experience that can engage students as if they were in the classroom. This presents unique challenges.
Meet the Need: Meet Students Where They Are
This leads us to a critical component of improving student engagement in online learning — how to create a strong sense of connection and community. The key is to keep it social. In fact, students increasingly want their instructors to incorporate and use social media as a part of their learning — not surprising when you consider today’s college-age student spends about three to four hours each day on social media. And this generation engages best with bite-sized pieces of information, preferably through video as the medium of choice.
So any technology an institution employs to facilitate online courses should foster social connection and be easy to use. Tools with a user experience that mimic familiar life experiences have the highest usability — think features like tagging, multimedia, notifications, and grid-like social media interfaces. If a student or instructor logs in and can connect the screen they’re viewing to something they are familiar with in their personal lives, they are likely to explore it more deeply.
Tools that provide a social media-like experience, with content creation, sharing, and reaction capabilities — make it both recognizable and easy to use, which lead to increased student participation and engagement.
Brown University also experienced increased student participation by incorporating social elements. James Foley, Director for Digital Learning & Design, says, “We elevated our course discussion experiences for students. With features that keep students engaged, we used a tool that made it flexible for all users and had the kind of built-in social engagement that increases student participation.”
Based on the way students interact today, a social-based approach can help students in an online course feel better connected to each other even if they’ve never met. This student engagement strategy creates a sense of community that doesn’t rely on a physical space, and it fosters a level of comfort that encourages today’s students — many of whom are already digital natives — to engage with one another and instructors online.
Easy Digital Experience
To facilitate effective online courses, the technology you employ matters. More often than not, the tools we choose for learning online can create barriers unintentionally.
Consider this. The first interaction with any tool can color a student’s perception of how easy (or hard) the tool is. If a student can accomplish a task in a new platform the first time they use it, then the tool has high usability. That small achievement has big impact. They will be more inclined to use it in the future rather than view it as a barrier or challenge. Introducing tools with high usability will drive better adoption and usage across your diverse student needs.
It’s also important to make sure all of your technology is fully accessible for all kinds of users. When thinking about accessibility and the kinds of tools to use in your course, ask these questions:
- Can the user easily perceive the elements presented in the tool?
- Can they operate the various functions of the tool easily?
- Can they easily consume and understand the content presented in the user interface?
- Is it mobile first? Can it be used from anywhere?
Meet the Need: Create a Seamless Digital Experience
Too many logins, hard-to-use interfaces, and tools that don’t work for everyone…the bottom line is: Don’t make learning how to use the technology for your courses a lesson in itself.
Instructors will be inundated with emails from students and spend more of their time on tech troubleshooting than on actual teaching. Rather, find technology and tools that are intuitive to students. The best employ features and interfaces most people are familiar with from other sites and online experiences. Don’t rely on a variety of disconnected tools that aren’t integrated with the LMS. This will only create additional barriers and more work for you and your students, potentially scaring them away from participating in the course to their fullest.
In the end, your online students are looking for the quickest way to achieve their goals and expect speed at all points in their online learning experience, especially when it comes to technology.
A Caring Network
Finally, Because they’re not physically present, online students lose more of the opportunities to interact, collaborate, and receive real-time feedback from instructors — all of which can create a sense of isolation and impact a students’ confidence and morale.
As humans, we’re social beings. We need social connection and interaction to deepen our learning experience. That connection builds trust to share different perspectives and fosters a sense of community, which can lead to increased student engagement, motivation, and performance.
When students feel they belong to a class community, they are more likely to be motivated to complete class work, feel safe enough to contribute to discussions, and be open to feedback that can help them improve. Many factors can influence students’ sense of belonging and community, including student-faculty & student-student interactions, how expectations are communicated, how accessible course materials and technologies are, and the range of perspectives represented in course materials.
Meet the Need: Strengthen Course Community
Like many aspects of teaching, helping students develop a sense of belonging and community impacts learning in both face-to-face and online courses, but attending to these dimensions in an online course takes intentional planning. Online instructors must take steps to connect with their students via digital channels and compensate for the loss of natural face-to-face cues and communication. In addition to being the subject matter experts, you now step into the role of community builder in order to create meaningful moments for interaction and collaboration online. Here are some impactful ways to do it.
- Use online course discussions about a particular topic as part of the class curriculum to help them not only improve their critical thinking skills but also encourages them to engage with others in the class in a meaningful way. Establish this conversation as a forum to connect with each without the pressure of a graded assignment. Send students off into their own small-group discussions to share their perspectives/research for on your course discussion boards.
- Create a Q&A board and polls for the class so they can post questions and crowdsource responses.
- Host virtual office hours to make yourself available to students, especially important when you don’t see them face-to-face throughout the week. Virtual office hours can be as simple as web conferencing with an individual or small group of students. Or it could involve adding a chat for those students, who just want to have a brief connection.
- Have students share videos and their thoughts on what they hope to get out of your course.
When there isn’t an opportunity for in-person interaction, being deliberate about creating those opportunities in an online environment will create a stronger sense of connection — and this is something your online students crave.
An Online Learning Experience that Serves Today’s Students
In order to attract, retain, and expand opportunities for online education, it’s important to listen to your students’ and evaluate the broader online learning experience at your institution, in your program, and for your course.
Successfully developing or evolving an online program often begins with finding out what students like about the programs an institution already offers. Guided by the core attributes presented here, you can canvass students to determine the specific areas where online programs are gaining high marks and those that underperform. At the same time, this approach will help you identify which groups of students are more likely to enroll in your online courses — again, valuable insight so you can be sure you’re meeting their needs. In the end, it becomes the work of your institution and instructors to implement the strategies that ensure online courses deliver the most meaningful and effective experience possible and, ultimately, better outcomes for students.
If you’re interested in learning how Harmonize can power engaging online courses, let’s connect.
