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Using integrated technologies in online courses to provide effective and meaningful feedback to students can leverage the unique affordances of online courses to support student success.
A high-quality online course that mitigates the inherent constraints and leverages the affordances of the online environment cannot be built overnight, emphasiz Alex Rockey, Instructional Technology Instructor at Bakersfield College.
However, in times of crisis—whether it be snow in the northeast or fires in the west—educators and students alike are frequently asked to just continue learning online. With remote teaching being used in emergency situations, proactively knowing how to teach and learn online is more important than ever. Educators at all levels need to have a sense of empirically based pedagogy to guide them when they are called to teach online.
Whereas college and university educators are sometimes asked to continue teaching remotely due to regional campus closures caused by blizzards, hurricanes, or fires, educators across the world were tasked with quickly switching to online teaching due to the global pandemic in the spring of 2020. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization designated the novel Coronavirus-2019 as a pandemic. In the days following this announcement, private corporations and institutions worked to mitigate the spread of this disease through the implementation of remote work and remote learning. Within a week, higher education and K–12 schools across the country announced the cancellation of in-person classes. By March 19, forty-one states decided to close schools, and 43.9 million students across the United States were no longer attending school in-person.1 In-person classes were to be replaced with online learning. For colleges, universities, and K–12 schools alike, instructors had a week at best to begin moving student learning online.
Feedback in Online Courses: Leveraging Affordances
In my role as an instructional designer at a four-year university and a community college, I found myself and my team faced with helping instructors rapidly move both their final exams and their spring courses online. Across these two dimensions, we faced myriad obstacles for both instructors and students as they moved to teaching and learning remotely. For instructors, these obstacles included moving a course to a learning management system (LMS) for the first time, using unfamiliar technology to deliver synchronous remote lectures, or redesigning in-person labs for online contexts. The obstacles that students faced were heartbreaking and raised serious questions about digital inequities. How were students supposed to finish their courses without a computer that had a camera and audio through which they could participate in newly remote class sessions? If students only had a mobile device, how could they complete assignments that required a computer?...
Implications for the Field of Online Education
Even before recent global moves to remote teaching due to the pandemic, online education was a continually growing sector of higher education at a time when enrollments in traditional higher education institutions are declining. A majority of academic leaders in higher education institutions see online education as crucial for an institution's long-term success.7 At this moment, public institutions are integrating online education to provide students opportunities to enroll in online courses (e.g., Brewing Science), online programs (e.g., Oregon State University Ecampus), and online colleges (e.g., Calbright College, an online California community college)...
Conclusion
In an online course, the impact of feedback can be heightened in that it is often the only interaction between instructors and students. In Brewing Science, student perceptions of feedback were relatively consistent, both before and at the end of the quarter, but student perceptions of interaction varied. Some research has shown that instructor-student interactions can encourage satisfaction and success of the overall course; however, other research shows that more interaction in online courses actually decreased course completion rates.12 Instructor-student interactions that mirror the synchronous nature of interactions in face-to-face courses do not leverage the integrated technologies in online courses that could incorporate meaningful asynchronous instructor-student interactions. These asynchronous interactions could support students who are poised to gain the most from high-quality online courses due to family, work, personal, and professional obligations that make success in a typical face-to-face course particularly challenging.
Source: EDUCAUSE Review
