The hard truth is online classes don’t work for most people most of the time. There are some people it can be amazing for. These people are self-motivated, eager, curious, and have a clearly defined reason for their learning. For everyone else, they’re about as useful as “This is the year I get in shape.” Some people will, but the vast majority will fail.
For your typical undergraduate student an online class is hard enough. Instructors know the bleak view of staring at a screen of black squares in Zoom. “I dunno if anyone’s listening. I hope this is working,” is all you can do.
Online asynchronous classes take this a step further, with otherwise boring lecture videos and demos recorded hastily or with a lone instructor. Suddenly, undergrads are tasked with sitting through already boring stuff they don’t really understand or care about, and they have to do it on their own time and schedule.
I’ve been teaching online asynchronous classes for going on seven years. I’ve also taught the same classes in-person on a typical 2x-per-week lecture format. And I’ve come to the realization that traditional classroom formats don’t work. My process also doesn’t scale, but it does seem to work better.
Ironically, one of the classes I teach online works better online than it did in-person because of the heavy reliance on reading several lines or paragraphs at a time. This causes awkward pauses in a lecture. But online, it gives people some time to chew.
Before I describe my plan, none of this is surprising. Humans have been adapting “old styles” to “new tech” and formats for ages. The first plays were books adapted to a central “stage”. The first radio shows were plays performed in front of a microphone. The first TV shows were radio programs recorded with a camera (Lucille Ball was on radio when CBS asked her to start performing her recording — simply her and a co-star standing in front of a mic reading lines — when they realized her facial expressions were funny. Thus later came I Love Lucy.)
A new adaption for online classes
My Website Strategy course focuses on what most people would just call “the content” of a website. But I increasingly view it as the experience, voice, style, tone, authority, and, yes, the material of a page. This is a multi-discipline affair, with video, graphics, text, and it all has to be properly formatted for the site, audience, and scope.
In a traditional classroom format this works like you might imagine:
- Each week students are assigned some small component task, like making a single page, email campaign, social media posts, etc. The lecture covers this in detail.
- Students do the work and submit it for a score.
- Everyone moves forward.
My approach has been like how businesses are finding their way through working online:
- Each week students are assigned some small component task, like a single page, email campaign, etc. There are demo pages or videos that covers this.
- Students do the work and submit for a score.
- I leave comments and require a revision.
- Students re-submit for a new score and then everyone moves forward.
In practice this means students skim into Canvas looking for what’s due, copying it out into an AI engine, asking it to summarize or just “do” the task, then they fling it back. Such is the nature of written assignments. They also do this last-minute, usually an hour or two before the assignment is due.
I have found that not defaulting to Canvas’ 11:59pm deadline is a great way to shake up the submission times. I randomly pick due dates — just like real life — for assignments. They always have a weekend, but maybe one assignment is due Tuesday at 3pm. The next on the next Thursday at 10:30am “Cause the meeting is at 11 and we need this by then.” This has increased earlier submissions by about a third. Where I might get 1 student who submits a half day or day early before and everyone else between 8pm-midnight, now I get 5-7 students submitting at least a day earlier.
Current experiments and pinpointing the real problem
I am convinced online classes are held back by Canvas and tools like them. Canvas operates on the assumptions that has powered classrooms at all grade levels for centuries. Things like:
- There are regular assignments with a regular, consistent cadence.
- There are some pages for people to read, without much or any interactivity.
- There are sometimes videos, but these videos are kinda small and compressed and don’t look very good.
- Everything gets turned in and once a score is placed, everything is done with that and we move on.
None of this is how the web really works today. Pages can and should be highly interactive. Even inserting columns in Canvas is hard unless you manually write the HTML or format it somehow.
Videos and screencasts are easier to do than ever, but also harder. The bar is so high with YouTubers with small teams and production budgets. Most instructors don’t even have a good microphone, instead just talking into their laptop screen for an hour. This is terrible by any measure. People can tolerate a lot of things, but they won’t tolerate bad audio in a video.
I have always published some of my edited videos to YouTube. These usually are edited to be as tight as possible and direct to the point. An in-Canvas version exists for school policy and accessibility reasons. But the YouTube video links are the ones students clicked on, if they clicked anything. It has a better experience saving play position, rewinding, etc.
My current experiments are doing away with all of this.
- Students don’t watch the videos, no matter how tightly edited they are. I’m not sure any video short of a big budget production would get attention from even half a typical class.
- Canvas has no good Chat mechanism, relying instead on clumsy Inbox/email formats.
- Canvas doesn’t like my “Here’s a grade, now revise it” method. I have to put special intervals as notes to myself. When I give a student a 35/50 that’s “Good first draft. Here are some comments. Re-submit” to me. If I see 35, I know, “They didn’t resubmit an update.”
- University policies and practices center on every student having “the same experience.” This is noble, in some ways. Every student gets the same level of instruction and every student does all the same task. But any adult knows this is downright Marxist in approach and means only the most aggressive students try to experiment outside that.
My Spring plan is shifting out of these molds the best I can by using other tools and treating my class more like how remote teams have been successfully working and adapting online for years.
- Each week is a small assignment that builds up to a single project. Basically, more smaller assignments that lead to a single larger piece worth noticing instead of a bunch of smaller, less-important assignments cobbled together.
- Each project lasts one month. There are three total projects in the semester.
- Each project is done for or led by someone other than me. For instance, one project this semester will be for America 250 and Indiana’s role as part of the Indiana Historical Society’s upcoming exhibits.
- To divide up the workload, a class of 18-20 is divided into three groups, all rotating across three projects after every four weeks.
- We’ll track progress in Trello or Fizzy. Students can toss cards into a “Blocked” or “Waiting” or “In Progress” column to signal they need help or are working.
- We’ll put everyone in Slack, so students can get closer-to-real-time chat with me and their project leads. They can optionally use this to chat with other students, but I’m no fan of group projects because their portfolios are diluted with work no one can tell who-did-what-in.
- Canvas will remain the Truth and authority on scores and submissions. E.g., “When you’re done, submit a link in Canvas to tell me you’re done and ready for full review.”
- I’m going to require every student meet with me at least twice, maybe three times in a semester. The idea being they can’t get ahead by being a phantom. I have too many students with no profile photos who, if they walked in my office right now I would not know who they are. This is terrible. So, everyone meets with me. I’ll do my best to give lots of options to accommodate work schedules. But my experience is most undergrads are taking online classes for lots of reasons: distance from campus, transportation issues, child care, work, or health issues. With the exception of work and maybe child care, most of this does not mean students can only do their course work at 1am. They do course work at 1am because they’re a hot mess who can’t manage time.
- I’ll expect some kind of mid-week check-in on each assignment to see some kind of progress or thinking. I want to engineer out the “This is due in 2 hours. Let me look at this real quick and see what I have to do.”
Universities should care about this problem
I think most universities probably do care about the online learning and engagement problem. Failure rates in online classes are higher than in-person classes. But universities surely recognize the profitability of an online class is so much higher since classroom space is expensive.
Frankly, most universities could shut down all online classes and they’d probably not notice. Many students would leave, many would just go to a classroom. But in the process their success and graduation rates would probably improve.
I don’t think that’s tenable, though. Education should be available to everyone who wants it and is well-suited for it, in a format that works for them. We’ve just been trying to adapt in-person classes into online formats by shunting everyone into Zoom boxes for too long. And online asynchronous classes take that a step further by shoving all the same stuff into an on-demand video with all the same tools as a traditional class.
I think traditional lecture classes work great. There’s a reason the format has stuck around for centuries. But I’m not sure it works for online classes at all. We need a different approach. At least for my courses where digital products are being produced, there’s no reason we can’t use better digital tools and systems along the way.
