The Human Element in Online Learning
As colleges pivot quickly toward online learning, here’s the secret most educators and students don’t yet know: done right, online education can be surprisingly intimate, write Larry DeBrock, Norma Scagnoli and Fataneh Taghaboni-Dutta.
As the nation prepares to meet the threat of COVID-19, we are surrounded by the language of loneliness. We move from “social distancing” to “self-isolation” to even the prospect of avoiding the people we love. At colleges and universities across the country, we are pivoting quickly toward online learning, or as it is often called, distance learning.
But here’s the secret most educators and students don’t yet know: done right, online education is surprisingly intimate.
That student who’s sitting far enough away in the lecture hall that you can’t quite read her expression amid the proverbial sea of faces? When you call on her in a live Zoom session, she pops up right in front of you, one on one, looking you straight in the eye. There is no back seat in online education — every student is in the front row.
That other student in back who never raises his hand? You might be surprised at how willing he is to open up and share his ideas in the live chat room that’s running alongside your primary content.
When you create small breakout groups online, you eliminate not only the chair shuffling and wasted time of moving people around, but also much of the awkward social dance that human beings do as they try to find their place in a new group. Over and over, we find that group work online creates strong team bonds in amazingly short periods of time. After all, many of our students grew up cultivating and navigating their social lives on screens and keyboards.
Three years ago, our institution, the University of Illinois’ Gies College of Business, created a new kind of online M.B.A., designed from the ground up. We certainly had more time to plan for it than do our colleagues who are now going online in the face of an epidemic. But for many of us, it was still a daunting dive into unknown waters. We all wondered what we would be missing.
The online program has been phenomenally successful, growing from 114 students its first year to 3,200 students this year, with high rates of retention and satisfaction. Students tell us they find great value in the educational experience. There are many reasons for that. But when faculty and staff members gather to talk about what is working, one theme that arises over and over is the level of engagement. And not just intellectual engagement with the course content, but human engagement — between faculty and students, and even more strikingly, among students from around the world whose main commonality is this shared digital adventure.
That is not to say that this emotional component in online education comes automatically or easily. Effective online teaching often requires more planning and more overall effort than traditional classroom teaching of the same material. Running useful office hours online, for a group of several dozen students at once, requires strict discipline and a lot of energy. And for those of us who did not grow up digital natives, it can still take some mental gymnastics to look into a camera as we would into a human eye — not to mention to perform the multitasking required to manage a good platform in real time.
But after immersing ourselves in this modality for a few years, we do have several practical ideas that might help you get the best out of this medium and create a compelling, engaging, enjoyable learning environment for students who might need that more than ever.