Busy.
Do students have too much to do in online courses?
We were recently informed by university administrators that the students in our fully online semester might be suffering from remote learning overload. It was suggested that if we lightened up on the tasks and assignments as the term drew to a close, that would not be a bad thing. The anecdotal evidence I’ve seen indicates that students are feeling more stressed out this term than might normally have been the case, and I would say the same goes for instructors as well as for all university staff. Everyone is wondering where the term went, everyone is behind on this, that, and the other thing, everyone is tired and slightly grumpy. Which is okay; it has been a hard year.
Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash
The general wisdom with regard to online learning is that to engage the learner, and to keep that learner engaged, numerous low-stakes activities are key. But this thinking originated in the Before Times, when fewer students took online courses. When I think of students in my online courses, most of them were students attending classes on campus, but they had elected to take one or two online courses for any number of reasons, usually in order to free up time in their schedule for other things.
We are now in a very different situation. Students are faced with taking all of their courses online. At my institution, most undergrad courses can only have optional synchronous elements, so if those instructors have been paying attention to the advice of instructional developers on campus, they’ve been providing more asynchronous tasks and activities than would have been the case in their face-to-face teaching. This in turn means that the students have to manage a longer to do list. They aren’t getting as many in-class reminders about upcoming tasks and assignments, so they have to keep better track of that on their own. This might be contributing to the stress.
As online instructors, we might be assigning a lot of activities because we aren’t yet comfortable with not seeing the students in front of us in the classroom, learning. Of course there’s no reason to assume that students sitting in a class are learning, but we have the assurance of seeing them do what we’re asking of them at that moment (even if it is just to listen and take notes).
In my courses, I often take a Jackson Pollock approach to education: throw as much paint (content and activities) as I can at the canvas (students) and see how much sticks. There’s not much I can do about this term; the students have already been splattered with a lot of paint. But next term I’m going to see if I can create an engaging course with fewer tasks. It’s a literature course, and I want the students to take their time and think - really think - about what they’re reading. My impulse is to assign simple learning tasks that register and make note of that thinking, but perhaps the added burden of those activities only serves to make me feel better (I’m teaching! They’re learning!) while distracting students from the more important activity of reflection.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 50/60.