3 key considerations when developing online education
We live in a world where there are different modes of teaching and study that educational providers can offer. It goes without saying that one of the most dominant for many of them is centred around sequences of face-to-face classes or sessions.
For many education providers, like universities and colleges this mode dominates their portfolio of courses and programmes, and as the dominant mode it also exerts the strongest influence on how they’re set-up as organisations.
The long legacy and dominance of that mode can result in challenges when education providers seek to make a change or start to offer courses and programmes in different modes like online education.
Changing from this long standing and most familiar mode can be jarring in lots of ways, not least for those who teach. Having worked with many educators making that move, lots of questions usually arise, such as what activities can I get students to undertake online? How do I get my students to participate? Or what technology do I use for ____?
These questions are often more focussed on pressing, immediate concerns or to address problems that are arising. This is all very understandable but in making a shift to teaching online it’s helpful to also take a step back from the immediate and hold in your mind some key differences to support this change.
These differences can also act as a basis for considering what might need to shift at an organisation level to best support a different mode of education.
It’s worth saying that there is a certain degree of tension when discussing the differences between online education and education that’s centred around time spent together in space within buildings. This is because there are many immutable aspects of teaching that sometimes make these kinds of discussions feel a little false. Equally, we no longer live in an age in which our educational experiences can be simply described as a dichotomy between online or not online.
However, I think there are three prevailing differences that you encounter when moving from face to face courses and programmes to online education.
Time
The first of these is time, that is, the differences in how time is spent and conceived of as an educator, teacher, trainer etc. The more common face-to-face mode of education tends to be built upon a timetable and rhythm of set time & place teaching of varying durations. Whilst that is also possible in online education through the use of video conferencing, it hasn’t tended to be a mode that’s strongly punctuated by long, regular chunks of live sessions.
This change can be very disorientating because a teaching timetable that follows a well-established formula can have a strong anchoring effect. If you no longer have a foundation that clearly sets out when and for how long you’ll spend with students week by week, you not only have an excess of freedom, but you have to think about something that you won’t have been required to before.
If you’re an educator this can throw up questions such as how much time should you spend each day or week engaging with students, or provoke fears around needing to be available and accessible to students 24/7.
Fortunately online education isn’t a mode that’s all about unfettered access and anarchy, it’s just structured differently. Different habits need to be developed and different routines need to be created to support online teaching, where there are different ways of interacting and communicating with students and them having access to educators.
This process and even having to think about it is largely unfamiliar and many institutions are not well set-up to support it. Inevitably, when all your policies and procedures have grown out of one dominant mode that has a particular understanding of how students access educators, the main means in which students and educators come together and frequency of that - there’s likely to be some friction, ambiguity and disconnect.
Of course some might reasonably ask why online education couldn’t or isn’t structured or timetabled in a similar fashion to a face to face mode. Well it’s entirely possible to create an online course that is largely a sequence of live online classes.
However, one of the key reasons why online education hasn’t tended to be structured like that is because it’s geared up to allow people greater flexibility to fit study around other commitments. Also, online courses and programmes can have a diverse international cohort of students in different timezones. This all means it’s more challenging to commit to and organise lots of set time, live interactions.
So in online education, a new pattern or rhythm needs to be created and defined. A good mental framework is conceiving of a week as the primary unit of time. This is opposed to the number of hours spent in a class having the strongest weight or bearing and being foremost in the mind.
From this fundamental basis, a set of clear and well defined parameters, ranging from expectations students have in terms of access to educators, deadlines and milestones, time on task rules of thumb and routines of communications to, and in response to students, can be established.
Place
The second key difference is what I would describe as a change in place. In online education the teaching and study experience is usually orchestrated through one central hub - typically a virtual learning environment (VLE) or learning management system (LMS). Although, you could argue that face-to-face modes of education are also orchestrated through online hubs, these hubs take on a greater significance and scope in online education.
Online hubs or platforms such as VLEs/LMS’ become central, focal points and the most important place or site as it were. They are where students engage with most of the organised and facilitated aspects of the educational experience and where they navigate to other online environments. This is a point of difference from other modes of education, where these platforms are usually used less expansively and there is less of a dependency on them.
A key contributing factor to a good online education experience is leveraging digital platforms or hubs to effectively support the overall experience. These platforms need to be used in a way that clearly conveys the pathway through courses as well as expectations and instructions. They need to support opportunities for student-to-student and student-to-educator connection & communication and become established as a dynamic focal point for courses and not become just a static, forsaken repository.
Unfortunately, the design and capabilities of some VLEs/LMS’ reflect the fact that online education isn’t the most dominant mode and it can be hard to get them to play a tune that’s most harmonious to online education. Creating and establishing a dynamic communication, interaction and collaboration hub is particularly challenging, as is supporting different manifestations of online educational experiences that aren’t a file structure foraging exercise.
From an organisational perspective, this might be an area where a different approach is considered. A more sympathetic platform might be adopted as part of a “horses for courses” approach to modes of education, or a greater level of resource might be allocated to the development of an existing digital platform to ensure it’s more capable of supporting a wholly online mode of education.
Similarly, the type of labour and the tasks involved in cultivating, structuring, maintaining and using digital platforms or hubs in online teaching is different from other modes of education. Organisations need to carefully consider things like the allowance of time for educators teaching in this way and what type of support roles might be needed to both ease the burden on educators and to enhance courses through specialised technical or design skill sets.
Although it is an imperfect comparison, as a thought exercise - education providers might consider juxtaposing the investment and ecosystem of support and roles that exist in and around physical teaching and study environments with online education. This may help dispel some myths that online education is a cheaper or low-budget alternative.
Interpersonal
The third key difference is the fact that almost all the interpersonal aspects of the educational experience are conducted via digital technologies.
Now similar to the point I made earlier about educational experiences not being able to be framed in the terms of a simple dichotomy between using technology or not - we also have to acknowledge that communication and relationship building via digital technologies also plays a big part in lots of educational experiences…..and in our daily lives for that matter.
However, there is a difference between that being part of a mix of ways in which the interpersonal aspects take form, and it being pretty much the exclusive means in a formal educational setting.
Although this might seem like a more subtle point, it really is an important and sometimes challenging difference. When the most dominant form of communication is text-based or non-verbal then there needs to be greater care given to things like tone of voice in communications, the clarity and ease of interpretation of a range of communications, and conveying the interrelationship between different components of the course and their purpose.
Although digital communication is pretty ubiquitous this doesn’t mean everyone is adept at it, nor that people are as intentional and thoughtful about how they communicate. Educators might need to think more about their online identity and conveying their personality and projecting to students their interest in and support for them for example.
If you consider the range of material there is on how to present to a live, physical audience as opposed to communicating digitally and asynchronously then perhaps you get a better sense of the differences and potential challenges.
From an organisational perspective this shift in the dominant form of communication with others might throw up questions as to whether ancillary student services can be easily accessed online - if and where they are offered. Education providers like universities can fall into the trap of setting up these services such that they overly privilege those studying in more dominant modes of education, leaving online students to struggle to access them in a way that is sympathetic to the way they’ve chosen to study.
Lastly, there are big considerations around what we might term the social aspect of the educational experience online. Whilst, a face-to-face mode of education creates conditions for serendipitous social interaction before and after sessions, as well as sometimes as byproduct of students living in or around the same location, this isn’t the same online.
More thought and effort needs to be put into supporting the important social aspect of an educational experience, as Krejins et al put it this might involve
“providing non-task contexts that allow social, off-task communication (e.g. casual communication) and that facilitate and increase the number of impromptu encounters in task and non-task contexts through the inclusion of persistent presence and awareness through time and space of the other members of the distributed learning group.”
How often do educators and administrators think about this and consider it to be an important part of their work when creating, supporting and offering educational experiences?
It’s certainly something that an education provider might consider more holistically but at the granularity of a course or programme it is much less common. In online education the lack of consideration of the social dimension will not only result in a reductive experience, it will also have the potential to stifle participation and involvement, and in that sense be counterproductive.
When thinking about the differences between an online mode of education and a face to face mode, there’s a potential to fall into the trap of simple dichotomies that squeeze out the nuance and overlap that exists across all modes of education.
But for education providers who want to move into online education or appraise their online education portfolios and operations, these three differences are a springboard to considering the impact a new or changed mode of education has on educators, staff, operations, policies & procedures to name a few, and what might need to be recalibrated to improve longer-standing portfolios.
As different modes of education grow and blur it will become increasingly important that education providers and educators - particular those with long-standing traditions or ways of approaching things - don’t just cast new or unfamiliar educational modes into old or traditional moulds. Because, when it comes down to it, offering a new mode of education is as much about organisational change as it is about a change in teaching and study.
