Improving online learning experiences: Five different insights
By Vidsplay
How do you create great online learning experiences? Well if you paste that question into a search engine you’re likely to find a number of suggestions, and in most cases that number seems to be ten.
Listicles aside, what people working in online education should realise is that crafting a great online learning experience entails a wide range of considerations. There are always aspects that even the most knowledgeable and experienced among us might overlook, neglect, or need to compromise on.
This is the nature of online learning experience design and online teaching. However, that means that there are always new things to learn and consider, and challenges to overcome.
With this in mind, I wanted to share five reflections on aspects of the online learning experience that have recently occupied my thinking. These reflections were inspired by reading five interesting papers and articles on online learning, each offering valuable insights on different aspects of the online learning experience.
1. Using nudges to improve online student engagement
Learning analytics has been the coming thing for quite some time now, but has not reached a level of widespread adoption in the UK. However, I sense that this is beginning to change, and is driven by macro pressures that are creating a greater sense of necessity and urgency around its adoption. These pressures include the regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), setting thresholds for continuation and completion, and the financial challenges faced by higher education institutions (HEIs), which have brought retention and continuation into much sharper focus.
A notable example of a UK HEI effectively utilising learning analytics is Nottingham Trent University. In collaboration with Solutionpath, they launched a student dashboard back in 2014-15. This dashboard draws data from various sources including the virtual learning environment (VLE), to provide their students with a daily engagement rating.
This is an example of how learning analytics can be designed and implemented on a large scale within an institution. However, learning analytics initiatives don’t always need to be a grand orchestration of data across an institution, they can also be more focused and smaller in scale.
One approach I came across recently, that was intentionally focussed at course level, involves using data from the VLE to identify online students with low or no engagement with key learning resources in a given week.
This approach was explored in a study conducted at the University of Queensland in Australia. The overarching aim of the learning analytics intervention was to make “explicit to students the importance and value of key resources or activities” on the basis that “early access to and engagement with course resources were understood to play a significant role in improving student learning outcomes”.
Simple nudges were used to boost student engagement with key learning resources on a weekly basis. This tactic was used across courses in different disciplines and the study found that the use of nudges was effective at increasing student engagement with key resources.
While the research scope didn’t extend to gauging the depth of engagement with key resources or its impact on student outcomes, the findings suggest that simple nudges are a student engagement strategy worth exploring for online learning experiences.
2. Questioning video as the online learning go-to
Video can be a great communication and teaching medium for online education and is often used extensively. However, if it was possible to conduct a thorough evaluation of the resources, time, and effort invested in producing videos against their actual impact on learning I think it would reveal a significant disparity between the effort expended and the benefits gained.
I’ve discussed previously how too often video is a default choice in online education, without careful consideration of its effectiveness or cost implications.
So given that, it was interesting to come across a research paper recently called “How Students Consume Online Lectures: Not Everything Needs to be a Video”. The study took place at Anoka-Ramsey Community College in the US and “examined how students consumed lecture material and compared the differences between their academic outcomes and perceptions of both the course and their instructor.”
The study entailed the educator offering students the flexibility to choose between viewing lecture videos, reading lecture notes, or combining both methods. Ultimately this study concluded that “video notes are not necessarily better than written notes”.
While research studies are always open to critique in terms of how they were designed and what we can meaningfully infer and take away as a result. The value of this study for me, was its contribution to re-evaluating the decision-making process when incorporating video into online learning.
Useful points it touched upon were considering if video is the most effective method within a discipline (in this case Political Science), where content can quickly become outdated and text is easier to update. Another argument made was that choosing text over video might add the side-benefit of improving students' reading abilities.
Then lastly, there was a call to reflect on one's own strengths and current limitations as an educator when choosing communication formats. Ideally educators would be adept and experienced at communicating across a range of different formats, but that is not always the reality. Online learning design sometimes needs to be pragmatic and that might mean aligning format choices with an educator's current strengths.
Of course this all says nothing of the impacts that AI will have on these areas, but given how long it can take for new technologies to permeate higher education, these things will still be relevant considerations for many.
3. The role of an educators emotional intelligence in online student engagement
Student engagement, which involves students being actively invested in and participating in the learning experience, leading to successful outcomes, is a goal shared by most online educators. However, fostering online student engagement is complex and isn’t achieved by discovering a single magic strategy. It encompasses multiple factors and is contextual.
One interesting aspect of considering how best to engage online students that I came across recently, was the role of an educator's emotional intelligence (EI) and related behaviours. This was through reading a research study conducted by academics at the University of Hertfordshire, here in the UK and Georgia Southern University in the US.
The study hypothesised “that there will be a significant relationship between students’ perceptions of their instructors’ EI behaviours and their own learning engagement while in online courses.”
Researchers explored four recognised dimensions of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Through interviews with online students, they identified specific practices and behaviours that corresponded to these dimensions in the context of online learning.
These practices included one-to-one video calls with students, openness regarding a personal situation, warmth when communicating, confidence in online interactions, emotional control regarding using technology, skills in using online technology, demonstrating concern for students and adaptiveness.
The study found “that instructors’ EI behaviours, as observed by students, were moderately associated with students’ learning engagement,” with relationship management in particular having a significant impact.
The study emphasises the relational and social aspects of the learning experience and their contribution to student success and engagement in an online learning context. These things are important yet sometimes are neglected considerations when designing online courses with not enough time spent creating conditions to foster these dynamics.
For online educators, this study serves as an important reminder that for all one’s pedagogical and subject matter prowess, being warm, open and showing concern for students goes an awfully long way.
4. Combatting digital fatigue in online learning
Online learners are often juggling full-time work commitments alongside their study. In light of that, one might reasonably draw the conclusion that online learners are particularly vulnerable to digital fatigue.
A recent article I read described digital fatigue in an online learning as “a sense of overwhelm resulting from prolonged exposure to screens, constant connectivity, and the unique challenges posed by virtual learning environments”
I’m sure the concept of digital fatigue is something many of us can identify with, but I wonder how sensitive we are to this in an online learning design context and how much it influences our decisions.
We aim for online learning experiences to be effective and high-quality, but how much do we consider the extent to which we’re requiring learners to engage with a screen. The post-pandemic increase in video conferencing for work meetings, despite its advantages, can be exhausting after a day filled with back-to-back Zoom meetings. For an online student needing to fit study in and amongst this work pattern, this might present an added challenge.
While I’m not totally convinced by all the strategies suggested in the article to help alleviate digital fatigue, the idea of incorporating periodic “tech detox” times during study sessions is one worth considering. We often overestimate our capacity to stay focussed during study time and underestimate the positive effect that taking breaks, like going for a walk or turning our minds to something else can have on later study.
Although it will seem to many like a backwards step, I have sometimes wondered about the use of print in online education as an alternative to lots of screen focussed time. But perhaps a more modern alternative is the greater use of audio and podcasts.
Audio has many affordances for hard-pressed online learners. Despite questions that might arise about it being a medium that’s more open to distraction or multi-tasking, the ability to engage with study material while out and on the move, demonstrates one way to balance the challenge of online learning and digital fatigue.
5. Should online education be beautiful?
One of the most provocative things I read recently was a study called “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty: Students’ Assessment of Credibility in Online Materials”
This research aimed to examine how students attribute credibility to online content that resembles social media posts, exploring the interplay between the aesthetic appeal of online materials and their perceived credibility.
The focus on social media was due to the idea “that aesthetic and cognitive judgment are deeply connected in social media, and potentially in other online spaces”.
I found this provocative because I have seen too many examples of online learning where aesthetics were overemphasised to the detriment of the online learning experience. In some cases, I’ve also seen an overemphasis on aesthetics, coupled with poor visual and design instincts that has resulted in a comically bad aesthetic.
Which I guess is to say that when it comes to this area there’s a risk that this paper unintentionally reinforces practices that lead to poor experiences. Nevertheless, I’m not naive to recognise the link between aesthetics and judgment, the relationship between the graphic design of wine bottle labels and my propensity to choose them is proof enough for me.
The study highlights the importance of presentation, stating that ”The significance of presentation is notable. The consistency with which well-presented counter-factuals were seen as more credible than badly-presented truths is striking” adding that
“The challenge for those who wish to gain the greatest credibility in the coming years will be ensuring the presentation of online education matches the truths to be found there.”
While there is nuance around all this, there’s no doubt that poorly presented information in online education does the experience no favours. Unfortunately, I’ve seen plenty of woeful presentations, videos and e-learning packages and we need to weed those things out more generally.
What this study shows is that an important dimension of well presented information is that it adds credibility and helps to guide learners to information that will support their success.
Summing up
Although no research study is flawless and universally applicable, there are things to glean from the work being done in the field of online learning. We are fortunate to have people who are actively seeking to discover how we might improve online learning experiences.
When I reflect on these five areas, I’m reminded of how sometimes different professional specialisms that contribute to creating and maintaining online learning experiences can be perceived as being more or less valuable than others, and how competition between them can arise.
Ultimately, my feelings on those differences and discussions are the same feelings I have looking across these articles on online education. Which is to say, ultimately, when it comes to creating great online learning experiences there’s a lot that goes into it and it all matters.
