Can Online Learning Fix Its Communication Breakdown?

Too much concern for money to burn
Too many things to do, now you don’t need me
And I don’t need you
Communication breakdown
Communication breakdown

~Roy Orbison

In my previous article: Why Do Online Classes Have Such A Bad Reputation?, I discussed the challenges of instructional equivalency vs learning outcomes between online and terrestrial courses. We explored teaching tactics used online that suffer a low equivalency to in-person instruction while failing to deliver consistent learning outcomes. Feedback from the first article suggested three ‘states’ of learning models: asynchronous online, synchronous online, and synchronous in-person. This is an important distinction to the analysis I delivered and asynchronous learning is indeed appropriate in some circumstances and worthy of a discussion down the road. For the purposes of my analysis in this series however, I am advocating that online learning can achieve the same synchronous success as in-person classes but we must re-tool it’s delivery to accommodate the needs and opportunities of the channel.

Let’s explore online methods which are instructionally equivalent to in-person classes but fall short in delivering to their potential in learning outcomes. At the risk of sounding pedantic, engagement remains critical to any learning tactic and here, learning outcomes suffer from lack of engagement but are solved in a more straightforward manner. Improving performance in this area can be achieved by focusing on increasing the efficacy of learning outcomes. As previously discussed, universities must resist employing strictly terrestrial mechanics with online students. This segment of opportunity has the potential to meet or exceed terrestrial methods, provided they are employed with the channel in mind. We simply cannot redeploy in-person methods without re-tuning (or re-imagining a different tactic) them for the channel they are being delivered through. Engagement suffers when the square-peg of terrestrial learning is forced through the round-hole needs of online learning.

Office Hours

Ideally, student meetings with teaching teams should be synchronous. Scheduled office hours are typically offered for online classes but the interaction is often relegated to the easier, and asynchronous, email inbox. These can still be rich interactions but they often take too long to establish, much less facilitate, a meaningful learning experience for the student. Teachers recognize this conundrum yet face-to-face meetings are still uncommon for online students. Online class rosters are made up of students from different time zones and complicated life schedules and their time for engagement comes at a premium, so students also compromise and accept email, at the cost of learning outcomes.

Terrestrial learning environments students stabilize student attention and availability through a marriage to a physical campus, but this is not possible online. Instead of corralling students, online teaching teams will need to diversify not only their availability, but their use of channels. Availability through expanded hours of coverage can employ existing tools like video conferencing but could also find synchronous success through chat and interactive spaces like Slack or Microsoft Teams. The fundamental issue becomes availability and access, and the onus is on universities to prioritize teaching resources for online students. They must be willing to spend the money to enrich the experience. And while it should go without saying, stepping up engagement here must benefit accessibility for students of all abilities, which I’ve seen online learning simply ignore.

Videos

Videos are a useful method for teaching some aspects of a course. Like any teaching method, discussion and collaboration is important for students. “Just watch these videos” is a staple of most online classes however, discussion and collaboration isn’t. As discussed in my previous article, discussion and inquiry between students and teachers is critical but often confined to the dreaded, and asynchronous, discussion board. A solution for this may be placing such content in an environment where it can be discussed, debated, and explored by students in a live environment. As with office hours, Slack and other collaborative helpers are good tools to cultivate these interactions. Again, teaching teams must be involved in these platforms otherwise the “just watch the video” becomes a variant of the asynchronous discussion board. Teaching teams should moderate and participate in these discussions to help students navigate the content and, ‘gasp’, teach through this channel to optimize learning outcomes. As with office hours, accessibility is a key need in online learning and at the very least, closed captioning must be addressed as part of enriching the online learning experience.

Textbooks

I’ll preface this section by saying I believe textbooks are too expensive and the overall academic textbook model needs to change before learning outcomes can improve in general. The politics of this issue are important but are not in the scope of this article (much of the trouble with textbooks in an online setting relates to how publishers monetize this teaching tool). Textbooks are an important part of imparting knowledge and achieving learning objectives. Typically textbooks are used in online classes and offered in two formats, hard copy and electronic. There is debate whether the two formats deliver equal learning benefit, I favor digital books and suspect true digital natives mostly feel the same. I believe some of the criticism about the effectiveness of electronic books comes from the way they are delivered.

In an online setting, physical textbooks hamper collaboration, mirroring some of the same symptoms noted above for videos. Electronic content can be more “‘”portable”, lending itself to the same collaborative features as videos if only this content was malleable enough to become part of online tools. When electronic versions are available, academia, in partnership with publishers, tend to muck it up in the name of protecting copyright$. I have personally encountered 10+ proprietary ebook platforms in my university experience, and none of them make study or retention easy, much less enable collaboration with teachers or other students. Being able to clip/highlight passages for note consolidation or discussion is nearly impossible because of copyright protections which limit these features. Although I want to avoid the politics of academic publishing, it’s plain to me that publishers and universities simply don’t know how to manage content like this and students pay the price in dollars and lack of flexibility. I’ve spent countless hours personally circumventing highlighting and clipping restrictions, not to pirate the book but to make sure I was ready for the test. No wonder there is doubt that e-books can deliver university-level results. The electronic format has more potential than textbooks are afforded and again, universities must be part of the solution, they can start by publishing the darn book so it can be consumed in ways that support learning outcomes.

Embracing The Asynchronous

We started with the idea of three states for learning and I posit there is a place for both synchronous and asynchronous learning, each are suited for solving particular instructional goals however, they must be applied correctly. In exploring both, we find each has a place in terrestrial and online learning, and today they share a sliver of commonality. The problem for online learning is that keeping students engaged with virtual lessons is more difficult when in-person tactics are applied. No class should be 100% synchronous or asynchronous, the best learning outcomes demand both. In this and my previous article I advocate ‘right-channeling’ teaching methods to ensure they are tuned to the student’s and teacher’s environmental needs. Learning outcomes in either scenario, could use a little help from the opposite side.

I also believe the best paradigm demands that the models be less dichotomous and more complementary. Melding the two models to find the best delivery of teaching doesn’t mean homogenizing them but instead creating a new model that redefines how education delivers learning objectives, both on and off-line. What if a common platform was available that students, teachers and universities could leverage to deliver courses, regardless of the channel. A design language approach can allow content to be developed with the multi-channel in mind, reducing friction for universities and more importantly, improving learning outcomes for students. We know a direct copy of face-to-face teaching tactics doesn’t work online and the same is true for the reverse. Equivalency in features and delivery however, can improve both and must contain one element in common, people. Unfortunately, people and right-channeling are sorely missing from many instantiations of online learning. When students have a facilitator or mentor on hand, someone to help with the technology and focus their attention, an approach sometimes called blended learning occurs and students perform as well in many virtual classes, and sometimes better.

Thanks for reading, I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Next up, I will address the last area of opportunity for both terrestrial and online learning, the dreaded group project.

Jeff Heinzelman is the founder of MostlyWest with 25+ years of experience in leadership, business process, customer experience and product innovation. I have led teams in many sectors, relying on a personal philosophy of people, process, and technology to deliver innovative products. I am an advocate of customer-focused product management connected to data-driven results. I am also a husband and father of two boys, and live in Austin, Texas where I enjoy Tex-Mex, BBQ, and football. Not necessarily in that order.