Practical Strategies for Facilitating Learning Online in the face of Pandemic
By Adam J. Bowen, PhD
Assistant Teaching Professor
Dept. of Philosophy & Religious Studies
Ball State University
In the face of the imminent covid-19 pandemic, academics are being tasked with carrying out an unprecedented mass migration to online learning environments. For many colleagues at my institution and others across the globe, this is a daunting and stressful task, due to general unfamiliarity with online education and the tools available. I have been teaching philosophy online full-time for 5 years, and prior to that I utilized online tools to supplement my traditional courses, so I have been training myself on online teaching methods and becoming proficient at developing online learning experiences for over a decade. Given my virtual battle scars and time served in the online trenches, I acknowledge a collegial obligation to assist fellow educators in their efforts to transition their courses online, in an attempt to sustain our universities and colleges in this time of crisis. My advice is not intended as a guide to master online teaching, since that requires years of experimentation and revision to one’s methods, as with anything worth mastering. I will, however, offer some practical strategies for how to effectively transition into an online learning environment, implement course activities that help realize target learning objectives, and temper your expectations about how to undertake this without scrapping your course-plans for the current semester.
To begin, I recommend some reflection on the methods you currently use in the traditional classroom, why you make those pedagogical choices, and how those choices are intended to facilitate student learning. What in-class activities do you initiate that helps develop critical thinking skills? What is the purpose of your lecture? Do you use structured group activities to encourage peer-to-peer cooperative learning? These types of questions will help identify exactly what you want your students to learn and how your pedagogical choices are intended to accomplish these objectives. Everyone has already thought about this to some degree when designing our courses, but re-evaluating your course activities and content delivery methods will help you decide what you need the online tools to help you achieve, in a manner that is comparable to your traditional course. Will you be able to find an easy analogue for every aspect of your current course? No, that is unlikely, and it would be unwise to set that as your goal under the current emergency circumstances. Rather, I recommend identifying the essential features of your course, i.e. the content and learning activities that make your course valuable to your students. There are a diverse set of tools in the online toolbox, and many of them do not require mastery to successfully implement.
Traditional classrooms are designed for synchronous learning during lecture periods. Whether you are leading a discussion, delivering a lecture, or guiding your students through a course activity, you are doing it together during that period of time. You might think synchronicity is essential to how you teach. But is it? For better or worse, much of the traditional learning model is asynchronous. Student complete readings on their own time, they write their essays on their own time, and they study for exams on their own time. Accordingly, how we structure learning activities outside the classroom is already as important as the learning achieved in the classroom, even for traditional courses. So, whether or not students listen to your lecture at the same time is probably not an irreplaceable feature of your course. Granted student engagement with your lecture content in real-time and the fruitful in-class discussions that erupt from these teaching moments can be immensely rewarding for students, and for educators. Witnessing “ah ha!” moments, the epiphanies of learning, is one of the things I miss most about the traditional classroom. Nevertheless, you are online now, and you will be woefully disappointed if you think that a live WebEx or Zoom lecture will mirror the best parts of in-class content delivery. It will not, and you should not expect it to. There are a morass of pitfalls lying in wait for you down the road of live online lectures. For starters, students and professors have varying degrees of competency with the video-conferencing platforms, so be prepared to provide IT support for your entire class and yourself while you try to teach. Mic feedback is a real bummer, especially when you can’t figure out which of your student’s unmuted her mic while her dog provides rousing vocals for Pink Floyd’s Animals in the background. Jokes aside, live online lectures might be good for some things (e.g. streaming a conference keynote), but facilitating fruitful student engagement in real time is not one of their strong suits.
This is one of the many reasons that full-time online courses and programs are typically designed to be asynchronous. Requiring my students to attend a live lecture at a given time is against official policy, because it puts unnecessary and prohibitive constraints on online learners. I have a large percentage of nursing students in my classes, because their clinical schedules are hectic and it is much more accommodating to take my ethics course online than to plan for in-class meetings. To its credit, online education accommodates students with full-time employment, active military personnel, parents rearing young children, student athletes with demanding training and travel, traditional students seeking more flexibility in their schedule, etc. Now we need online education to accommodate students and professors under conditions of pandemic quarantine. I recommend preserving the accommodating and flexible virtues of online learning, and use those features to your advantage.
You are converting a traditional course, so your students have already committed to being available during your class period. So, synchronicity should be expected, right? Perhaps, but who does that choice serve? We are not in familiar waters. Bear in mind that your students are also facing the contingencies of pandemic preparations and coping with a complete upheaval in the normal routines of their lives. You are too; overburdening yourself will not benefit anyone, least of all your students. I would caution against requiring them to meet online for a lecture or discussion at a specific time. Do yourself and your students a favor, embrace an asynchronous learning model and adapt to structuring meaningful learning experiences outside the classroom. If you really need your Synchronicity fix, just listen to the Police album from 1983 and enjoy the musical stylings of Sting, Copeland, and Summers.
For an asynchronous option, you can record lecture material and post it online, either in an online learning environment, on YouTube, or email your students a file to download. Zoom, WebEx, and Mediasite are all useful programs for recording lectures, sharing slides while you present lecture content, and allowing you to edit yourself before posting. You may having varying degrees of comfort with this technology, so find a solution that works for you. For instance, one of my colleagues provides audio lectures, similar to a podcast, that correspond to the course notes for his lessons, which is another viable means for content delivery, especially if lecture slides are not essential to your teaching style. For the sake of your students’ attentional resources, try to keep your lectures short, under 10 minutes is typically recommended (cf. Bradbury 2016, Schachter & Szpunar 2015, Bunce et al. 2010). Remember that asynchronous learning also enables students to pause or stop whenever they lose interest.
Providing asynchronous content delivery is one task, but structuring meaningful student engagement with course content is an arguably more critical challenge. How do you break-up lecture material in your traditional class? Guided discussion? Quick writing or thinking exercises? You can implement these sorts of course activities online. Low stakes writing exercises related to lecture content or course readings can be submitted online, in the same manner as higher stakes writing assignments. Setting-up an assignment submission portal is one of the easier tasks to accomplish even for Blackboard and Canvas novices. You can also adjust settings to require submissions to be automatically checked for plagiarism, which deters most students from engaging in academic dishonesty.
Online learning environments like Canvas and Blackboard are also equipped with discussion forum platforms, which offer considerable flexibility with how you structure them. For guided discussion and peer-to-peer interaction, online discussion forums can be used to create a space for students to ask questions about the lecture or related readings, offer their thoughts on a particular problem, try out an argumentative strategy, advance an objection, explore some possible application of a principle, or simply raise healthy skeptical concerns. For this purpose, you can create a dedicated discussion forum for a particular module in your course, create specific threads on the forum with a prompt or question as the starting post for each thread, and then provide some detailed instruction on your expectations for student participation on the forum (e.g. each student must contribute to one of the threads and respond to one of their peers’ contributions).
The clearer you communicate your expectations for forum participation to your students, the fewer frustrations you will encounter. Let them know what types of posts they should be making, what types of peer-to-peer interactions you encourage, tips on how to meaningfully extend a discussion (even when they are not confident in their own competence on the subject), and normative guidelines for acceptable forum conduct. A clear policy regarding online decorum is necessary; given the lack of online civility modeled on social media platforms, students need a reminder that course discussion forums are not a place for trolling, insincere bad faith arguments, bullying, insulting speech acts, or any other vicious behaviors. I recommend making forums graded, because ungraded forums are virtual ghost towns, but you can make the participation low-stakes and pass/fail, to reduce the pressure for students and the grading burden for yourself. Will these discussion forums exactly replicate your best classroom discussions? Maybe not, but with a little forethought you can effectively utilize them as a space for peer interaction and for gauging student comprehension of course content.
One final bit of advice on discussion forums: try to resist the temptation to jump into the discussions too soon. Allow students to engage with each other prior to offering your expertise and insights. If you respond to student contributions early and often, then you run the risk of silencing some student voices and perspectives that should be represented. Put constraints on your own participation, which will vary according to the purpose of your forums. If you are using a forum as a space primarily for students to ask questions, then obviously sharing your responses in a timely manner is imperative. Alternatively, if your forum is more multi-purpose and designed to encourage student participation, then you should exercise some restraint as to when and how often you chime in. Otherwise, students will expect your contributions and tend to devalue input from their peers.
To conclude this brief primer on online teaching I will return to the dual themes of setting clear expectations and providing detailed instruction. Regular communication with students and detailed practical instructions are paramount to achieving engaged student learning online. Instructions for every writing assignment, every forum, and every course activity should spell out in plain unequivocal terms your expectations for student performance, the criteria for assessing their performance, and any other salient details. You no longer have the benefit of providing additional informal clarifications in the classroom, so you need to include those extra points of elucidation on the assignment instructions themselves or in follow-up announcements. In addition to typical writing assignment instructions and prompts, I often include “tips & guidelines” for successful performance and an assessment rubric when appropriate. Your students will be grateful for your transparency, and they will not inundate you with hundreds of emails asking for clarification on every graded assignment or activity. Additionally, it is important to remind students about upcoming deadlines or advanced notices about important course happenings (e.g. an announcement when final essay prompts are or will be posted). Canvas and Blackboard have native announcement functions, which are typically synced with student university email accounts. As opposed to sending out large group emails, I prefer to post announcements in the online learning environment, which generates automatic emails to students. This circumvents the problems with students deleting emails, not reading emails, or having group emails filtered into a clutter or spam folder, because the announcement will remain posted online on the course site no matter what email habits a particular student may practice. Not being informed should never be an online student’s problem or complaint. It is our duty as online educators to provide relevant course information to our students as clearly, directly, thoroughly, and regularly as possible.
With crisis threatening, let us remember to support each other. Be supportive colleagues, be understanding mentors, be accommodating educators, and be rational philosophers. Let us do our level best to attempt to be a calming presence for our students, even from a distance. You may have lost your classrooms temporarily, but you have not abandoned your students or your duty to foster their intellectual growth.
Works Cited:
Bradbury, Neil A. 2016. “Attention span during lectures: 8 seconds, 10 minutes, or more?” Advances in Physiological Education. 40 (4) 509-513.
Bunce DM, Flens EA, Neiles KY. 2010. “How long can students pay attention in class? A study of student attention decline using clickers.” Journal of Chemical Education 87: 1438–1443.
Schacter, D. L., & Szpunar, K. K. (2015). “Enhancing attention and memory during video-recorded lectures.” Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 1(1), 72-83.
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