How can faculty deliver and refine their online courses?

Joe Bandy, PhD

Factors that create access challenges

It’s one of the largest challenges of teaching online since it reveals many of the inequalities our students experience in their homes, in their communities, which we often don’t see in face-to-face learning environments. Some students have great connectivity, technology, and access, while others simply do not. In the spring, I had students who were engaging fully in the course, face-to-face. But when they went home, a couple of them were in rural areas with really bad connectivity and were having to use cell phones with very spotty connections to try to do all the writing for the course and connect with discussion boards, much less the synchronous zoom sessions that we were holding. Because of structural disadvantages in our society, there is a whole other category of student who haven’t developed the self-confidence or self-regulation or self-efficacy to guide themselves through an online course without a significant amount of support. They just haven’t learned in this way before. They just need a lot more guidance, a lot more communication, a lot more sense of expectations, maybe even a personal connection to their peers or to instructors. So, it presents a wide array of challenges and to address that, I think schools have to do a lot of work to equip students with the technology they need, if they can, and to support faculty development that emphasizes inclusive and equitable teaching so that instructors can do the best that they can.

Adriane E. Seiffert, PhD

Examples of access challenges

So there are lots of issues. The student is accessing the whole class through her phone. She doesn’t have a computer, so she does everything through her phone, including writing all of her assignments. I have another student, she is a receptionist, and she does the class while she’s at work. So, we have Zoom discussions and she contributes the best she can but there’s noises going on behind her because she’s in a work environment. I had a student who had separate audio and visual channels, because the video camera worked on his laptop, but the sound didn’t work so he has to use his phone for the sound and the computer for the visual. I’ve had students who had difficulty downloading the lectures, and so I put them all on a VU Box, taking out the video component with me and just left voiceover on the slides so it’s easier for them to download. I did have a student who expressed difficulty with accessing class material because he didn’t have a safe place to be. He was accessing the course through his computer at hot spots, at different places in the country. I didn’t have a solution for him other than posting materials in a way that was easier for him to download, allowing him more flexibility with when to upload assignments and meeting with him when he could meet to work through a plan. When he got really behind, we met and talked about it and said, “Ok, well, here are the things you absolutely have to do. Here’s how you can do that with the time that you have. And here’s the likely grade you would get if you complete these.” And talking through a plan for how to do it really made a difference for him.

Joe Bandy, PhD

Four suggestions to reduce technology access challenges

The first practical bit of advice for instructors is that they focus on asynchronous activities more than they used to so that students with limited connectivity will still be able to access any number of discussion board posts or lecture content that they can download slowly in their own time and engage in a course at their own pace. That will help students with low bandwidth or lower technology resources.

Second, the core structures and communication strategies must be really clear and supportive so that students have full and multiple directions and support whenever they want to engage with tools or activities and assessments. So just throwing a syllabus online and hoping students follow it may not be sufficient for some students with lower self-regulation. They need instructions about how to use the tool. They need instructions about what the goals are and what they’re supposed to achieve, any rubrics that might help them to give guidance about the criteria by which they will be assessed. That means more e-mailing, more clear and intuitive course structures online or office hours, potentially one-on-one student conferences and reaching out to those students who might fall behind.

A third bit of advice would be to scaffold assignments so as to make sure the students are progressing in their development of autonomy and self-efficacy towards the learning goals.

Lastly, I would try to develop a culture of inclusion and equity that allows students to feel fully engaged. That can mean making course content and assignments more culturally and personally relevant to them, but also creating cultures with your students about how you all wish to help everyone in your class to thrive. That might mean opening conversation with students about what collaborative learning looks like and what type of voice that they wish to have in in their learning process. And that can actually make all students, regardless of backgrounds, feel more socially and intellectually engaged in the work of learning in the course.

Adriane E. Seiffert, PhD

Ask questions

I haven’t really been able to help a lot of these students other than be commiserate and be supportive and try to help them solve their problems. They have to find a way to ask me the right kind of question, like, “Could you post on another website?” or “Could you describe things in a different way so I could read it rather than listening to it?” All of those sorts of things have been really helpful so I hope students continue to reach out with suggestions about what can help them.

In general, what I tried to do is to meet every student from where they are. I think that’s one of the things that faculty do already, but now we’re going to need to do it in terms of the technology as well as in terms of their ability to learn. So, asking questions like: What device are you using? How is your Internet connection? Is it reliable or not? What other factors are going to keep you from working on class now? Are you going to need to travel sometime in the coming future and how are you going to schedule that in with your other responsibilities? All of those are going to be things that I’m going to start talking to my students about in the fall and I expect will be important for everybody to consider.

Joe Bandy, PhD

I think a first step for any instructor is to really start to examine how they approach the content of their course and their students, and to examine any biases or limitations that they might impose on how they interact with the content or with students. If we don’t do that, then we can sometimes erect barriers and have difficulty connecting with our students and where they are. Second, I think it’s really important to get to know our students, learn what makes them motivated, and help them to thrive in our courses. You can do that in the form of background knowledge surveys, or one-on-one meetings earlier in the semester, or assignments that might be more, say, autobiographical. If you have the opportunity to do that in a social science or history class or something like that, that can allow you to personalize assignments and help students select, you know, a relevant paper, discussion contents that are motivating and engaging for them. Certainly when it comes to content and how and who can access it, I would suggest all video conferencing and lecture capture have closed captioning, and make sure that all of the posting that one does in a learning management system be intuitively well-structured so that there is good guidance throughout. All of that can be good not only just for those who might have various disabilities, but also English language learners and any number of others who just might not be familiar with the course structure or content. When it comes to the readings, assignments, and activities, I would really try to ensure that all of them have diverse voices included, not merely the voices who are already well-represented in our society. If students aren’t able to see people like themselves in the course readings or examples or case studies that are used in a course, then it can be difficult for them to see the course or the subject matter as relevant or even meant for them. So, using examples, for instance, in a science class or statistics class that focus on sports—that’s going to be exclusive to women students potentially, or anybody who is less of a sports fan. Citing scientists who are exclusively white men may subtly teach women students, and students of color that they really have no place in science, potentially. And maybe they are distracted, and stereotype threat grows where they believe they can’t perform in the class. The cognitive load thus goes up and their performance actually diminishes. These kinds of things are common in the research on difference and education. But we, as instructors, can do a lot to mitigate them by being attentive to differences, trying to address them and our own biases, and coming up with assignments, whether it’s online or face-to -face, that are all inclusive.