What I’ve Learned from Designing and Teaching Online Courses for Adults

Apr 13

Apr 13 What I’ve Learned from Designing and Teaching Online Courses for Adults

From 2006 - 2007, I enrolled in online courses for the first time. It reminded me of the Wild West. There didn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason for why I was doing particular assignments. There was no consistency or unity throughout the courses. They weren’t even styled correctly with some of my courses in Blackboard being colored with pine tree green and neon pink (no, I’m unfortunately not joking). Beyond the chaos of the appearance, every course format was predictable. I had to purchase a physical textbook, read a few chapters a week, submit a discussion post, and then turn in an essay. I repeated these steps for 10 weeks and then moved on to the next course. What this really meant is that I was told to read something I didn’t know the purpose behind it, I was forced into conversations with my peers where everyone agreed with one another, and then I had to write a 500-word essay on what I “learned.”

Was I actually learning though? I would get straight A’s by following the directions, lightly absorbing the content, and then was able to repeat the information back. It was a baffling feeling to be proud of my achievements yet feel like I wasted thousands of dollars at the same time. The root cause of my issues was with how the courses were taught and designed. There isn’t necessarily a right way vs a wrong way of designing online courses, but there certainly are common mistakes to avoid and best practices to follow to make the learning process meaningful. You can’t simply take how a course is taught in-person and then copy the exact same thing online. Far more thought has to be put into the design process and of course, how someone is then going to teach the content.

Now, do I blame these instructors for the way the courses were designed and taught? No, of course not. I don’t know of any person who had an incredible jaw-dropping experience in the online space back in the early 2000s. How to effectively teach and design wasn’t readily available like it is today and hiring instructional designers wasn’t common practice yet. Unfortunately, some institutions still design and teach online courses in the same manner from my 2006 experience and that needs to change. Hopefully, this blog post and podcast episode move that needle in the right direction.

Funny enough, my learning experiences (I guess I can call them that), which lead me to failing out of high school, combined with the early online learning days, has lit a fire inside me to try and make the online learning space a better place for adult learners. There seems to be this notion that since we are designing for adults, we don’t have to put in as much care and attention to detail. They are adults after all so they can just figure it out, right? Well, not so much. I’d argue that because these students and learners are adults, we have to go above and beyond. Adults already have a million other commitments and now their education is about to get put on their already overflowing plates. The best way I can think of for trying to make a difference is by sharing what I’ve experienced with learning nerds like yourself. These tips come from teaching online at Southern New Hampshire University and University of Miami, designing online programs at MIT, teaching at Instructional Design Institute, writing a book about making instructional design your career, and teaching my own instructional design courses on Eduflow Academy.

So, here is a brain dump on all the things I’ve learned about designing and teaching online courses for adults:

Create a Welcoming Environment

Let’s pretend that you are starting a new job and it’s your first day. What do you think your day will look like? You’ll most likely have some kind of job orientation. You’ll go through trainings, listen to speakers, shadow a veteran employee, talk to new coworkers, and learn about the culture, benefits, etc. I think of starting an online class like a new job. There has to be an orientation for obviously A) becoming comfortable with the learning platform and expectations for assignments, but more importantly is B) who is in the classroom.

In a normal face-to-face classroom, the instructor will typically introduce themselves and have students go around the room to do the same. This can be replicated in the online learning space in a few different ways. It depends upon the comfortability of the instructor and the resources that the institution offers, but I do this through either GatherTown or Zoom. In GatherTown, you can create your own virtual space for students to connect with each other. The beauty of this space is that GatherTown becomes the conversation starter and it instantly breaks the ice. How many times have you used a virtual video platform that looks like the Legend of Zelda? I’m going to guess not much. It’s a fun way to overcome the Zoom fatigue that many adults have faced during the pandemic and it reduces that awkward new introduction feeling.

However, I can’t speak ill of Zoom since my new favorite orientation activity is “speed networking.” William Cronje introduced me to this where every 5 minutes, 2 students are placed into breakout rooms, and it keeps on cycling until time runs out. As the instructor, I also asked to be in the breakout rooms and it as a ton of fun! After doing this, I could see the chemistry between the students and it created far more participation in the future sessions with everyone having a chance to talk with one another. Of course, I’m not going to forget about those who couldnt’ attend the session and for them, the sessions are recorded. There is a follow up activity to the recorded sessions as well to then drive the conversation into the discussion platforms. It essentially becomes a continuation of the conversation and students really enjoyed it.

Explain the “Why”

If I ask someone to perform a task, I’m going to explain the purpose behind it. Any leadership course will mention how transparency is key to making decisions. Sharing the details and asking for feedback about a decision builds trust among a team. It also builds inclusivity by sharing what factors were considered and by creating ownership over the idea.

The online space can be the same way. When I design online programs, I use a method known as Backward Design. To extremely simplify Backward Design, it means starting with the end goals in mind. What problem are we trying to solve? What skills should the learners be developing and working towards? From there, we can design assessments, activities, and content to focus on achieving our main outcomes and this should be a transparent process to students. The course should be constructed in a way for students to visibly see and monitor their progress and growth with every step they take. This can be done with every ask that we have for students. It’s not effective to simply say read chapters 1-5 and expect our learners to hyper focus on every word. It’s far more effective to say read this case study on leadership and specifically think about the transparency issue. How did the character’s decision directly impact the team? Can you think of a time you experienced a leader making a group decision without considering the feedback of employees? How is this going to serve you in the future? By not mentioning the purpose, I feel like we are all speaking like Rev. Lovejoy when he provided guidance for Principal Skinner.

Factor in Experiences

As a designer, I absolutely love this challenge! How do you design a course for everyone, but everyone comes in with different levels of prior knowledge? This one takes a few tries to get right, but once you do, it’s awesome to see this fully develop. To give you an example, I have a course about collaborating and building relationships with subject matter experts (SMEs). In my opinion, this is where new designers struggle the most because no one teaches you how to use influence to get buy-in for an idea. However, as an instructional designer, it is crucial for me to the designer and the SME on the same page and sometimes, that takes a bit of convincing. When I designed the course, I was thinking about how current instructional designers are going to enroll, but also, folks transitioning into the field will want to take it too. So, how do I design for people with such varying levels of different experience? The solution was to provide options for the assignments, activities, and resources. For instance, let’s take one of the reflection activities about working with SMEs. I asked students to think about a time they had to work with a challenging SME and to document the experience. What went well? What could be improved upon? What will be done differently the next time around? For those that weren’t instructional designers yet, I asked them to think about a difficult working relationship with a supervisor or colleague rather than an SME. The same concepts still apply about seeing another person’s perspective and trying to figure out a better way for problem solving.

These varying levels of experience also make for incredible conversations in the discussion boards, Slack, Circle, Zoom, or in-person. The IDs are encouraged to share their experiences so their peers can provide tips for conflict resolutions and the newer folks are encouraged to openly ask questions. Celebrating different levels of experience with sharing and having the conversation become organic is a beautiful thing.

Focus on the Process

If you want adults to use critical thinking skills, decision-making skills, and emotional intelligence, you need to explore open-ended questions. You want to see the students’ thought process and how they arrived at their decisions. What factors did they consider before making their answers? Who did they turn to for advice? What steps did they take to actively research the problem? You need them to become cognizant of their own thought process and by asking them to document how they use logic to arrive at a decision is quite a telling tale.

For instance, I designed a course at the height of the pandemic all about innovation and creating new products and services. I was trying to create a problem that didn’t have a correct answer and this was quite challenging to do. I noticed that more and more organizations were working fully remote and all of the live events were cancelled for the foreseeable future. Then the idea hit me. How are businesses surviving that rely on live events? What exactly are they going to do? As this course centered around innovation, it was the perfect topic to make students think about how to implement new business models. If you worked for a company that has always relied on selling products at live events, how can you shift this model to a different one without causing catastrophic confusion? It was fascinating to see the ideas that students came up with for using new subscription-based models, membership exclusives, ticket-based private webinars, and more. The most interesting thing about all of this is that while students were completing these assignments, they could turn to real-world as a gigantic case study. Every business around them was trying to shift to a new business model and every day, a new organization was announcing a new strategy. Personally, I never imagined buying an exclusive ticket to a movie premiere on YouTube, but it happened, and for students, this real-time out of the box thinking ability was what they needed.

Be Vulnerable

We’ve all had that one professor who was delusional. They thought of themselves as the greatest instructor of all time and they didn’t need to hear student feedback because their courses are perfect. This “holier than thou” complex has got to go. We’re human beings. We aren’t perfect. We make mistakes. By admitting this to students, they don’t view you as being inferior or a bad instructor. In my experience, they appreciate the honesty.

I’ve had classes before where a student will ask me a fantastic question and I don’t have an answer. Rather than trying to spitball and make something up on the spot, I’ll say something like, “That’s a great question and no one has ever asked me that before! Let me do some research and I’ll reach back out to you soon.” I’ve also taken the question and flipped it back to the other students to ask them to chime in with their thoughts. As I’ve mentioned earlier, adults have plenty of experience and I don’t doubt their abilities to contribute to the conversation when I can’t.

Speaking of being a human being and factoring in adults’ experiences, you should constantly be listening to student feedback. This can come from course evaluations, surveys, fireside chats, interviews, focus groups, or whatever method you prefer. It doesn’t matter how many times I run a course, I always ask for feedback and do my best to incorporate the ideas into the next run. If you work in education or L&D, I’m sure you consider yourself a life-long learner. Learning can simply come from our audience and being receptive to new ideas. Not all of them are feasible and some might even contradict one another, but I guarantee that you’ll hear one idea and be like, “Why didn’t I ever think of this before?!” It happens every time. Our students learn from us, but we learn just as much from them.

Embrace the Community Aspect

Years ago, one of my professional goals at work was to network with more instructional designers. I found myself wanting to connect with other professionals and to learn from them. What were they doing in their designs to make the learning experience engaging? What tips could they share with me to have a more lasting impact on my students? Turns out, I wasn’t alone in this. I witnessed an explosion in growth with instructional designers wanting to learn from one another through networking events, communities, groups, podcasts, and more. Eventually, I made a Facebook group to bring people together with whom I’ve connected with over the years.

Adult students are in the same position. They want to learn from their fellow peers. This could mean hearing a different perspective from another industry or receiving feedback from a person with the same amount of years of experience. By hosting weekly workshops and creating peer-reviewed assignments in my courses, they have completely changed the learning environment. The focus is not on me, but it’s on us as a community. They know that other people in the class are in the same positions as themselves and working through the same relatable problems. The power of togetherness is tremendous and if we can harness this as a learning community, students will succeed more.

Encourage Asking for Help

When students enroll in my courses, it means that they are trying to solve a problem through education. That should always be the focus. I want students to learn and most importantly, to remember the information the next time they need to use it. I’ve taught many courses before where I have to really drive this point home to make them understand. They’ve been wired to think that grades are the most important thing and they’ll rush to get assignments done before the deadline. What learning is taking place though if the emphasis is on cramming? The emphasis should be on the experience. If someone needs more time to work on an assignment, that’s perfectly A okay by me. The quality of submissions has drastically improved when I can shift the mindset around the stress of grades and deadlines and pivot to the goals of the assignments. However long it takes to achieve that goal is what we are going to roll with. Yes, there has to be some level of accountability and we can’t give folks forever to work on an assignment, but being understanding to the fact that adults have many other commitments goes a long way. I care about my students’ mental health and well-being far more than I care if an assignment was submitted by midnight or not.

During the height of the pandemic, I was constantly posting announcements that if they need to message me for more time because they were overwhelmed, that’s perfectly fine. I was always willing to make a game plan with them to get them back on track. All I asked was to be kept in the loop. I didn’t need reasoning or any details. They just had to let me know when they were in a better headspace and we would continue the journey together. The world needs more compassion and if we can do this as instructors and designers, we will all be in a much better place.

I could write many more tips, but the blog needs to stop at some point, so I’ll conclude here for now! While is a rather long list, if you can implement any of these into your online course, I’d consider that a huge win.

If you enjoyed these tips and want to read more about adult learning theories and andragogy, New England Institute of Technology has an easy to read guide about adult learning. If you want to take a real deep dive, I’d recommend the research of Dewey, Knowles, Mezirow, and Kolb.

Stay nerdy out there.

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