Online Learning Preparation

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, online education has experienced a phenomenal rate of growth. While at one point online education was little more than an experiment, it has now reached the point at which virtually every college and university, and even some high schools have their own online learning departments, which collectively reach millions of students every year. With online education being so widely available, it might seem that it would be long past the stage at which it is necessary to conduct any special preparation for online learning, but in fact such preparation is more important than ever.

Overview

Preparation for online learning takes several different forms. The first form is the preparation required by the college, university, or other institution that plans to offer online coursework. This institutional preparation includes the creation of the infrastructure that will support all of the online activity; the institution must train instructors in online course delivery, and must set up its own learning management system running on a server at the institution or hosted remotely, so that students in online classes will be able to connect to the server and interact with one another. The institution must also see that appropriately rigorous curriculum is developed for the online classes, either from scratch or by converting the requirements for existing, face to face classes to work in an online environment. This is often a major concern for colleges and universities, which must maintain their academic standards if they wish to keep their status as accredited institutions (Shattuck, 2014; Varonis, 2014).

Another type of preparation is that needed for online learning is training to help instructors learn how to conduct online courses. Instructors are usually accustomed to face to face situations in the classroom, where the teacher can immediately recognize when students are not understanding the material, or when they need to be guided into focusing on a particular part of the lesson, by visual cues such as puzzled expressions or raised hands (Hartshorne, Heafner & Petty, 2013). In an online learning environment, these visual cues are not present because the instructor and all of the participants in the course are interacting with their computer screens, unless the online course is using some type of live video streaming so that all of the participants can see each other using the cameras attached to their computers. In the absence of these visual cues, the instructor must use other types of feedback to assess how each member of the class is understanding the material and whether each student is participating to the degree required.

For example, an instructor might notice that several students did not log in to the online course for more than a week. This would be a signal to the instructor that the students were experiencing some kind of difficulty, and that it would be a good idea for the instructor to reach out to them by phone or email to see what type of issue or issues had arisen (Ribbers & Waringa, 2015). Understanding the need to monitor course participation and check up on students who seem to fall by the wayside is just one of the tasks that online instructors need to be trained in, because an instructor only used to teaching college classes in a face to face format would not necessarily understand the need to engage with students in this way, without having the issues explained.

Most colleges and universities have some type of faculty training in place for those who are just teaching online for the first time. This training can take the form of a full orientation program in which the new online instructors attend one or more training sessions, facilitated by instructors with experience at online instruction, or it can be as simple as having an online faculty handbook ready to distribute to all new online instructors, so they can read through it at their own pace and ask questions if they are unclear about any policies or procedures (Bowman, 2010).

A third group that needs to be prepared for online learning is the students themselves. Just as with instructors, students are more accustomed to learning in face to face situations, since this is what they were exposed to throughout elementary school and high school. To prepare students to learn online, they must be shown the layout and operation of the learning management system, they must be given demonstrations of how to use the system to perform routine tasks such as adding their comments to a discussion thread and uploading assigned documents to be scored as part of their grades.

Perhaps most important, students must be trained as to the course expectations for participation. If the instructor expects each student on a weekly basis to do all of the reading, turn in the weekly assignments, begin one discussion thread, and respond to three other people’s discussion threads, then all of those tasks need to be explicitly spelled out in advance. In a traditional classroom there are many ways for an instructor to make sure that students are "tuned in" to the course: frequent eye contact between instructor and student; the student raising his or her hand to answer questions from the teacher, or to initiate a discussion for the whole class to participate in, and so forth. Many of these opportunities are not available in the online environment, so the instructor must deliberately build them into the structure and process of the online course, instead of relying on them to spontaneously occur on their own (Wills, Leigh, & Ip, 2011).

Applications

A blended learning course is one in which some of the instruction takes place in a face to face setting, while other sessions are held online; thus, two different instructional modalities are blended together. This model is also referred to as hybrid learning.

"Self-paced learning" refers to the pacing of the course and the timing of course milestones. It is present in many online courses to some degree. Traditional courses require all students to follow the same schedule for reading, homework, and tests. Self-paced learning allows all students to set their own schedules between the first and last days of the course, provided they get all of the work done by the time the course ends. For example, in an eighteen-week course that uses a self-paced model, a student could conceivably choose to do all of the work the first week, spread the work out evenly over all eighteen weeks, or wait until the last moment and do everything in the last three days.

A massive open online course, or MOOC, is a very large online course that is open to anyone who wishes to participate, as opposed to courses that only admit students who have registered and paid as students at the university hosting the course. MOOCs usually do not award education credits since they are free, but they allow tens of thousands of people to try out courses that are within their area of interest. Some prestigious universities such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) make some of their courses available as MOOCs as a way of sharing knowledge and elevating the public discourse (Barriers, 2012), and some MOOCs can be taken for credit at the sponsoring school, provided all the coursework is complete and credit-worthy.

Viewpoints

It is often assumed that students in college, university, or high school classes are well versed in technology and so advanced that they do not need any type of training related to computers or the Internet. This assumption is actually quite inaccurate, for a number of reasons.

Nontraditional Students

A large number of students in higher education, where the majority of online education takes place, are what is known as "nontraditional," meaning that they are older than what is considered customary for college students. Most nontraditional students are in their thirties and forties, though students in their fifties and sixties are not uncommon. Many of these nontraditional students are resuming their studies after devoting several decades to work or to raising a family, so large numbers of them have very little experience with technology. These students often continue to work full time while attending classes, so they tend to be drawn to online learning at higher rates than traditional college students are, because online learning offers them flexibility in terms of scheduling.

Nontraditional students unfamiliar with technology have a very strong need for preparation and continuing support so that the online environment does not become overwhelming for them; students frequently report that when they do not know how to navigate the online learning system, taking one course becomes as difficult as taking two classes at the same time, because not only must the students master the material that is the course’s actual content, but they must also learn a whole other set of tasks and procedures, namely those required to participate in the online class environment (Palloff & Pratt, 2011).

Digital Natives

Much has been made of so-called digital natives, meaning young people who were born after the creation of personal computers and the Internet. Because these people have always been surrounded with technology in the form of computers, cell phones, and so forth, some educators and policy makers believe that young people are able to instantly understand and adapt to technology in any form. The reality is that even though young people are comfortable with technology, this does not mean that they instantly understand how to operate any type of technological interface placed before them.

Many young people have a natural aptitude for technology that manifests only when the technology is fun to use (for example, a video game console) or has a fun purpose (using a cell phone to contact friends on a social networking site). When the task at hand is educational rather than entertaining, the technological advantage possessed by younger students quickly diminishes. It is therefore as crucial to instruct students of all ages how to use an online learning management system as it is to describe what the expectations are for each online course (Coombs, 2010).

Asynchronous Teaching and Learning

One aspect of online learning that students have reported having great difficulty with is related to the asynchronous content delivery model used by most online courses. In traditional courses, students are able to ask clarifying questions more or less immediately when they do not understand something, and receive a response from the instructor within a matter of seconds. For example, if the instructor is demonstrating how to solve an equation on the blackboard and one of the students in the class does not understand one of the steps, that student can immediately raise her hand, ask for an explanation, and then receive the instructor’s explanation. Because online learning is usually asynchronous, this same scenario would play out very differently (Means, Bakia, & Murphy, 2014).

On Monday the instructor might post a video showing how to solve the equation. The student might log on to her class and watch the video late at night on Tuesday, and feel frustrated at not understanding the problematic step. She would not be able to ask the instructor to clarify and receive an immediate response; instead, she would only be able to post a question to the course or send the instructor an email asking for help. Several days might pass before the instructor received the message and had time to respond to it, and during the interim the student’s frustration would build, as would her anxiety at not understanding the course content well enough to be able to do the assignments with a reasonable amount of certainty that she was on the right track. Being able to adapt to this kind of delayed gratification is a major part of preparing to enter an online learning environment, and not all students are able to adjust their thinking in a suitable fashion (Keengwe, et al., 2014).

A common response by students in situations like this is to reach out to one another for assistance, and this increased tendency to collaborate and confer is one of the hallmarks of online learning. Students ordinarily may keep to themselves because they feel that they are in competition with one another for grades, or because they do not want to be seen as cheating by getting the answers from others. In online courses, however, most students feel these inhibitions to a much lesser extent. Ironically, some instructors have a difficult time accepting that students will inevitably collaborate more when they are learning online, for the same reasons that students avoid collaborating face to face. Instructors new to online teaching worry that students are conferring together in an inappropriate fashion when in reality they are often just trying to help one another feel less isolated and more competent. Part of the instructor’s preparation for online learning includes adjusting to this cultural difference between online and in person instruction (Huggett, 2013).

Terms & Concepts

Asynchronous Learning: Asynchronous learning is a phrase often used to describe the traditional method of online instruction in which participants do not all have to be engaged in learning at the same time. In a synchronous learning model such as a face to face classroom environment, all of the students and the instructor must be together at the same time. An asynchronous model is often used in online instruction, and allows the teacher to post an assignment which students later log in and read at different times. Students then post their work as they complete it, rather than at the same time.

Blended Learning: A blended learning course combines online and on-campus instruction; thus, two different instructional modalities are blended together. This model is also referred to as hybrid learning.

Discussion Thread: A discussion thread is a series of messages pertaining to the same topic, with messages contributed by different participants in an online learning course. Students can share their views and reply to others’ messages, in order to analyze course content. Online instructors often assign students to have online discussions of the course readings, as a way of refining their thinking and confirming that they did the work.

Learning Management System (LMS): A learning management system is an online environment which students and instructors use to create and manage online courses and to interact with each other, post assignments, and submit work for grading. An LMS can contain many different elements: discussion forums, document repositories, assignment submission boxes, and so on.

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC): A massive open online course is an online course, usually developed and administered by university faculty, which is available to anyone.

Self-Paced Learning: Self-paced learning is present in many online courses to some degree. It refers to the pacing of the course and the timing of course milestones.

Bibliography

Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in US Higher Education. (2012). Distance Education Report, 16(11), 6-8. Retrieved January 3, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=77250802&site=ehost-live

Bowman, L. (2010). Online learning: A user-friendly approach for high school and college students. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education.

Coombs, N. (2010). Making online teaching accessible: Inclusive course design for students with disabilities. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Hartshorne, R., Heafner, T. L., & Petty, T. M. (2013). Teacher education programs and online learning tools: Innovations in teacher preparation. Hershey PA: Information Science Reference.

Huggett, C. (2013). The Virtual training guidebook: How to design, deliver, and implement live online learning. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.

Keengwe, J., Schnellert, G. L., Kungu, K., & IGI Global. (2014). Cross-cultural online learning in higher education and corporate training. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Ribbers, A., & Waringa, A. (2015). E-coaching: Theory and practice for a new online approach to coaching. New York, NY : Routledge.

Means, B., Bakia, M., & Murphy, R. (2014). Learning online: What research tells us about whether, when and how. New York, NY: Routledge.

Palloff, R. M., & Pratt, K. (2011). The excellent online instructor: Strategies for professional development. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Shattuck, K. (2014). Assuring quality in online education: Practices and processes at the teaching, resource, and program levels. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Varonis, E. M. (2014). Most courses are not born digital An overview of the Quality Matters peer review process for online course design. Campus—Wide Information Systems, 31(4), 217–229. Retrieved January 3, 2016 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=99128354&site=ehost-live

Wills, S., Leigh, E., & Ip, A. (2011). The power of role-based e-learning: Designing and moderating online role play. New York, NY: Routledge.

Woei, H., Flom, E., Manu, J., & Mahmoud, E. (2015). A review of the instructional practices for promoting online learning communities. Journal of Interactive Learning Research, 26(3), 229–252. Retrieved January 3, 2016 from EBSCO Online Database Education Research Complete. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ehh&AN=109152735&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Austin, R., & Hunter, B. (2013). Online learning and community cohesion: Linking schools. New York, NY: Routledge.

Hathaway, D., & Norton, P. (2012). An exploratory study comparing two modes of preparation for online teaching. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education (International Society for Technology in Education), 28(4), 146–152.

Rice, B. J. (2015). Mapping relational models for online teacher preparation and development. Advances in Research on Teaching, 25, 187–207.

Whittle, S. R., & Bickerdike, S. R. (2015). Online preparation resources help first year students to benefit from practical classes. Journal of Biological Education (Routledge), 49(2), 139–149.

Williams, N. V., & Casale, M. J. (2015). The preparation of teacher candidates for k-12 online learning environments: A case study. Mid-Western Educational Researcher, 27(2), 142–151.