The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
What’s the best online course you’ve ever taken?
As a teacher and a student, I’ve experienced online learning from both sides. And I have thoughts.
Online courses, especially those taught through an accredited institution such as a university can be quite dry and disengaging.
Some (un)lucky professor or teaching assistant was assigned to turn a syllabus into an online course. Powerpoint slides are ported over to Moodle* or another LMS*, possibly given a few interactive elements, a bunch of forums tied to each lesson, and boom, it’s online learning.
And it’s generic, lifeless, so that any prof can teach it. The only hope the student has of having an engaging course is the other students in the forums. All the pressure of engagement is put upon each (usually, paying) participant. You’re both the audience and the main attraction.
There have been many attempts to make courses more interactive or fun (H5P is a protocol that allows for gamification of some content). But when push come to shove, you’re still just interacting with a screen.
When I was studying to be a teacher, our instructor asked us to pick an analogy for what a teacher is. I suggested that a teacher is a tour guide. Your job is to be more knowledgable than the students, to lead them to something, and to know that for some, it will already be known and understood, but for others, it would be novel or even confusing. You’d need to work with those needing more guidance while juggling the needs of those already at the goal. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it works and it’s formed the basis for my teaching style.
That’s not an easy approach to teaching, and doubly so online. You lose students to distraction. Both those already at the goal and those struggling disengage. They call up a second screen and start doomscrolling Tik Tok.
As a teacher, I would leave an in-person class exhausted, having spent energy to engage my students and challenge them to keep up with me (usually using a combination of self-deprecating and situational humour. Never making fun of a student), making the class fun for all.
It’s hard to create an engaging presence online; you can’t make the students feel individually seen and respected. There is no eye contact. Students learn that you looking at the camera is not you looking at them per se. They dismiss the humanity.
The Best
The closest I’ve ever experienced to an engaging online presence as a student was one of the first online courses that I took, back in the 1990s. Online learning was more of a wild west experiment to see what would work. Instructors had more freedom.
I don’t even remember the course’s exact name. It was a third-year undergrad course about communication styles and clarity with an emphasis on how to spot and avoid miscommunication.
The instructor came up with a novel way of engaging the students. She would start each week’s discussion with an example from a current or recent TV show. She would challenge us to explore the dynamic of the scene (if we’d seen it. There were VCRs back then, but no online video) or come up with another example from our own viewing experience, or later, as we developed as a community, from our own lives.
Converting a course about communication into a seminar on how to deconstruct, or possibly write, an episode of Friends, Cheers, or Seinfeld gave us all a sense of both purpose and possibility. It was like we were being handed the keys to become professional comedy writers (or at least TV critics).
I loved that class. I loved the way the instructor framed what could be otherwise dry content into something that was practical in our everyday life and also that offered just a hint of a goal if we wanted to strive for something more.
The Worst
My worst experience with online education was from an employer. The British Council insists that all employees go through online certification courses, some as often as yearly. Now this is the organization that prides itself on being the gold standard of ESL and IELTS teaching.
These employee courses were the most boring courses ever. We quickly learned that you could just click through pages and take the exam at the end. If you passed, you got your certificate. if you failed, well, you could always take the course again, and this time read the necessary parts.
Apparently unhappy with the speed at which some of us were getting our certificates, BC added timers on the pages so that you could not advance past parts you already knew until an approved amount of time had passed. They also added mini-quizzes that you ha to pass to advance to the actual certifying quiz.
Being antagonistic towards your learners is a sign of failure, not success.
The Segue
Speaking of “Success,” I was part of the team that developed “Learning for Success,” an employee training system developed by one of Canada’s major banks. It wasn’t as antagonistic as BC’s employee training, but in hindsight it was pretty dry.
I have recently taken two online writing courses through the University of Oxford’s distance Education program and they did suffer from the generic-ness that i mentioned at the start. Your experience with the course depended a lot upon your assigned tutor. From my two courses, I had one tutor who did a pretty good job of engaging us, and another who appeared to do the minimum. I haven’t gone back for a third course because what I was getting out of it wasn’t worth the money.
If a university like Oxford can’t crack the code for making engaging online classes, I’m not sure anyone can. So I’ll sit out taking any online learning courses for a while, and see if someone cracks the code into making them a better experience.
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*Moodle is the dominant Learning Management System (LMS) used by major universities and many school boards.