Supporting Online Course Success

Since moving online in March we have had the opportunity to learn from the experience of faculty, instructors, students, and staff about what has been working and some of the challenges moving online. We wanted to share 5 themes that have been emerging and strategies for dealing with these.

 An Ethic of Care

One of the most significant challenges facing higher education in the era of COVID-19 is the sense of isolation and overwhelm affecting both learners and educators. It is unlikely that educational philosopher, Nel Noddings, knew how relevant her pedagogical notion of “the ethic of care” (1984) would become in 2020 when compassion, care, and connection would be paramount to student success – even more so than usual. The ethic of care proposes that students are more likely to succeed in supportive learning environments, where pedagogical relationships are given central importance alongside content (Noddings, 1984); the ethic of care takes on a new meaning - and an entirely additional form of labour - in online spaces where relationship development cannot rely on face-to-face gatherings and the intuitive interpersonal interactions. 

One thing that universities and institutions sometimes fail to recognize, however, is that often when we see a spike in mental health crises for students, we also see similar struggles for faculty, staff, and other members of educational teams. For these reasons and others, an ethic of care - for both yourself and your students - should form the bedrock of your teaching practice during the pandemic (and arguably, at all times). By taking care of your students and also yourself, you can support their learning and you will also be in a better position to provide continued high-quality education to your future students. Below, we share a few strategies for building an ethic of care into your courses. This begins with streamlining labour (yours and your students'), being clear and concise with your communications, setting a rhythm for the course, and modeling flexibility and agility in your responses to changing teaching and learning contexts. 

Workload 

The amount of workload for both faculty and students has increased during the pivot to online teaching. This is due to a number of factors including the changing modality of assignments, the inclusions of multiple small activities such as online quizzes and discussion activities in each course, and the challenges that many faculty and students are experiencing during the pandemic. One of the challenges that many faculty and instructors are dealing with this term is how we can reduce some of the required workloads while maintaining the same rigor and quality. If you want to explore student workload in more detail complete the Student Workload Course Development Activity.

 

Clarity/Organization

An area that has been a reoccurring theme for students is the need for clarity both in course communication and course organization. With students taking up to five courses with different layouts and communication it can be challenging to know what to pay attention to in their courses. Online learning often requires a particular emphasis on clarity and organization in design and communication during the course. This intentionality can span course design, communications, assignment instructions, synchronous activity instructions. 

 

Connection

A challenge that often arises in online courses is the missing sense of connection between students and faculty and students and each other. We know that learning is social and that people tend to learn with each other in the community (Downes, 2020). How can we foster this connection and community in our online courses? 

We will be exploring fostering connection in more detail on Day 3 of this program, however; the following strategies can start you off thinking more about this aspect of online learning. 

 

Flexibility

Students have diverse needs and a way that we can meet these needs and at the same time focus on an ethics of care is to find ways of including more flexibility in our course assignments, assessments and course delivery.