Patch Nineteen: Be Kind Online

A response to the Thought Vectors and Nuggets Activity
created by Hoshedar Batliwalla (@hbatliwalla)

Number of views: 199


Patch Nineteen: Be Kind Online

“There are many examples of “bad” online courses which are basically correspondence courses that use email. Students have been conditioning to blow through the online course, paying attention only to activities that are mandatory and assessed, and ignoring the rest. While this can feel like a direct insult to a course developer who has spent countless hours fine-tuning the online environment, I really don’t think it’s meant to be personal. Students have many competing priorities and often the online course is hidden away, out of sight and out of mind. I spend time in the first week “strongly encouraging” (forcing) students to make time for their online course. I tell them that to succeed in the course they will need to spend at least four hours a week working through content, activities and producing the evaluated components of the course. I can say this with confidence because I’ve had previous students track their time spent on assignments, and I can leverage LMS analytics to see how long students work within the course. I tell students how long it will take, and the first written assignment in my course asks students to articulate exactly when and where they will work on the course, and what their contingency plans are should something come up unexpectedly. This opens up a conversation about effective study habits, time management strategies and related course policies and seems to, at the very least, negate some of the passive-aggressive “this course is too hard” grouching that I’d see within some of the discussion forums.” 

 

Based on the extract above, I agree that as educators teaching in an online environment, we must be kinder than we normally are in person. Through personal experiences of learning, I have come to understand that learning online is significantly more challenging than learning in-person live with a teacher.

This could be due to many factors:

  • The teacher keeps us on track and at a pace that we would not be able to define on our own when studying online.
  • Topics that don’t make sense or are challenging to understand, queries are resolved instantly, whereas in an online environment the student has to dig deeper and hope to find the issue and resolve it.
  • Studying online involves the student reading the material by themselves, process and understand the information and make sense of it, whereas a teacher explains a topic and uses various activities and tools to help the students deep learn the topic rather than surface learn.
  • Every student has a different pace of learning, and this can be challenging for some learners and may give up, whereas in an in-person environment the teacher can encourage and motivate the student to not give up and push forward.
  • Distractions such as social media, work commitments, calls, events can cause the student to make their time-tables flexible and unknowingly or knowingly keep their course commitments on a low priority, whereas studying in class gives the student the minimum time commitment for the course and helps them understand the topics rather than regurgitate it without any distractions.

Due to the above points and many other variables, I can understand how students get frustrated to learn online as it is a lot more work. As an educator, I make these factors known to students from week 1 of the course so they are not walking into the unknown of online learning and are very aware of what challenges they may see in the semester.

 

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