How to Support New Online Students
As each day passes, the world of education is moving one step closer towards all online education. Teachers, professors, and instructional designers are doing their best to make online learning come alive with what little time they were given due to COVID-19. It’s actually amazing seeing so many educators come together to work through this face-to-face to online version dilemma. As online courses are designed at a rapid rate, I want to slow down and bring attention to one group who is going to need support the most: the students. These students, whether they are in high school or college, know about online learning, but they’d prefer to have an in-person experience. We would be naïve to just assume that they can acclimate from one setting to another with a flip of a switch. Learning in these capacities have different skill sets, requirements, and mindsets. As someone who teaches a course on how to be successful in the online environment and a graduate of an online Master’s degree, here are my tips on how to support new online students.
Design a “Start Here” section
Most online courses have a type of Week 0 or Start Here section for students to read/watch before beginning the course content. This section is a type of smooth transition that will prepare students for absorbing the content. Given all that is happening in the world right now, this section is essential with providing students every opportunity to learn. What should be inside of this section? As I’ve mentioned above, having the right mindset to complete online school work is vital and this could be overlooked by students. Start with simple guidance such as designating a location in their home to complete their work. This could be a kitchen table, their bedroom, an office, etc. A space is needed to be identified so when they are in this location, it’s time to work, just like how a remote employee does the same practice. This space will provide a separation between school work and home life. It counters distractions and will also set a tone of when they leave this location, it’s time to switch their mindsets to a more relaxed state. During this time, I would also encourage students to keep their normal behaviors as much as possible to not cause more interruptions. This will obviously be different for everyone, but for most college and some high school students, they usually bring a cup of coffee with them to class. I’d encourage them to do the same remotely. Even a small feeling of keeping the same behavior will provide more results instead of changing up an entire lifestyle all at once.
The other crucial component in this Start Here section would be the topic of growth mindset. We have known for years that students with growth mindsets are far more likely to succeed compared to those with fixed mindsets. According to Carol Dweck, Stanford University psychology professor, and her colleagues, “Research shows that students’ belief in their ability to learn and perform well in school—their self-efficacy—can predict their level of academic performance ability and prior performance” (2014, p. 5). Some students may enter your course feeling uneasy and nervous with being new to online learning. Provide words of encouragement to them and express your belief that they can do well if they try. Now more than ever, students are looking to their teachers as leaders in this space and your confidence in them will go a long way. As a type of ice breaker for your online course, you could have students reflect and think about a time they used a growth mindset and ask what the outcomes were. The same could be said for having a fixed mindset and determining what the results could have been if they had utilized a growth mindset instead. For supportive material, you can include Carol Dweck’s speech directly into this section of your class to help students understand the power of a positive mindset and belief in themselves.
Create a Community
One of the number one fears, if not the number one fear, I hear from new online students is the dread of feeling alone. To many new students, there is a perception that working on a laptop in their bedroom means that there is no community. It’s a culture shock as they were accustomed to being in a group learning environment for so long and now they don’t know what to expect. For many students, social media has the reverse effect of its intention and makes them feel isolated as they don’t have the shared experiences as those they see online. To ease this tension, a type of online learning community should be established. This community will create a sense of belonging and identify for your students. It’s a private and safe space to discuss the learning material, but more importantly, these communities can be used for students to talk about their experiences with what the world is facing. These communities can be on the learning management systems’ (LMS) discussion board, a LinkedIn group, a Facebook group, Discord, or my favorite, Slack. Active participation is needed for these groups to thrive, but given the circumstance of what we are going through, just having this available will help students. Whatever community you decide to use will help these students feel like they aren’t alone in this process and that they are being supported.
Establish a Human Presence
As I’ve already mentioned, these students preferred to take face-to-face classes, so how do you support this in an online setting? Establishing a human presence is going to be crucial. These students want to know that you are still there to support them every step of the way. My first step would be to create a “welcome to the course” type of video. This would be a video introducing yourself, if you haven’t already, talking about the expectations for the course, types of assignments, different course components, and additional activities. This type of video is useful for students to learn more about yourself and what they can expect for moving forwards. I place my videos on YouTube and then embed them into an announcement on my LMS. It looks like this:
YouTube - SNHU Welcome Video
If you are wondering how I recorded this video, I used an iPhone 11 and this tripod to hold the phone. I also sat by my sliding glass door to provide some natural light and made the edits using Adobe Premiere. You are certainly not expected to do all of these things and your institution may even have someone to help you with this editing/filming process, but that’s what I did. Either way, don’t be afraid to be yourself. This is your classroom and these are your students. Create this human presence however you can, even if it’s a bit silly. One thing that made a majority of my students feel like they got to know me was when it was Star Wars Day at work and I took a photo posing with a stormtrooper.
Another normal day at MIT.
It might be silly, but it shows your human side.
Provide Feedback and Time Management Advice
Until you experience an online course for yourself, you don’t realize how much feedback and time management come into play. In the online space, it’s easy to procrastinate on an assignment and then to feel like you have to cram on Sunday night to submit everything. To counter this, time management should be taken into consideration on both the instructor’s side and the students’ sides. The instructor needs to set aside enough time to be able to review each assignment and provide timely and accurate feedback. This feedback should address the students by name and be crystal clear on what the student did well on and how their work could be improved if needed. You are going to want to space this out enough where the students will have enough time to take the feedback into consideration, ask you any follow up questions, and then can implement the feedback. For instance, if a student was struggling with writing, you could show where they made errors and how to correct them. Changing their writing behaviors won’t happen overnight, but by the end of the course, their writing could improve significantly with each piece of feedback. As you can imagine, this takes a bit of work on the instructor’s end so time management tactics should be utilized by the instructor.
From the student perspective, time management will be used in a different way. Best practices dictate that having the students log into the course on multiple days will lead to a greater gain of knowledge. This has the element of the spacing effect. These practices try to limit cramming and burning the midnight oil to get work done. One of the most useful practices I have seen has been to give students a blank calendar for a week and ask them to fill in where they plan to do their classwork. With these students already juggling several other commitments, the calendar is eye opening for them to figure out exactly when it makes sense to complete their work. For many students, after they have completed this assignment, they had to make changes to their schedule to fit everything in. Some of the common strategies I’ve heard have been students waking up earlier, changing their shifts at work, and instilling breaks in between study sessions. With all of our schedules being thrown into the air, this time management practice could be helpful now more than ever. I’ve already heard of some students “taking shifts” for baby-sitting their siblings because their parents are now busy working remotely.
To go with this time management piece, what I would recommend for both educators and students would be to take advantage of the technology we have on our phones. By this, I mean set up your work email on your phone, set reminders on your calendar app, and install the app for whatever platform you decide to host your community on. This creates more ways for your students to reach out to you for assistance and also helps with staying on top of everything so you don’t need to feel glued to your laptop.
Share a Sense of Understanding
What do educators care about the most? We want students to learn and be able to use what they have learned to better their lives. I have already answered several emails from my students panicking because COVID-19 has impacted them or their family and they are afraid they’ll fail my class. Besides caring about their safety as my top priority, I care that they learn the information at their own pace. All of my emails and course announcements lately have been trying to establish a sense of understanding and being calm. If they need more time to submit an assignment, no problem. If they want to talk over the phone to better understand their feedback, that’s A okay. Whatever students need during this time, should be provided for them.
These are only a few ways to support online students and I know that my strategies are coming more from the mental perspective rather than specific tools to use. I have seen so many posts lately about the resources instructors can provide, but I haven’t seen as many posts about caring for the students overall well-being. Capitalize on both types of resources and know that you are making a difference.
We are all in this together.
Have a question on anything I wrote about or want to add this blog post as a resource for your guide? Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or email me.
Reference:
Dweck, C.S., Walton, G.M., & Cohen, G.L. (2014). Academic tenacity: Mindsets and skills that promote long-term learning. Retrieved from https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/manual/dweck-walton-cohen-2014.pdf
