by Bethanie Hansen | Best practices, Higher Education, Podcast, Students, Teaching Online
This content initially appeared at APUEdge.com.
Podcast with Dr. Bethanie L. Hansen, Associate Dean (Interim), School of Arts, Humanities and Education
Efficiency is important, but online educators must be mindful not to sacrifice student relationships for the sake of efficiency. In this episode, APU’s Dr. Bethanie Hansen shares eight strategies to consider when working to improve your efficiency while also building relationships and connections with students.
Listen to the Episode:
Subscribe to Online Teaching Lounge
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | Pandora
Read the Transcript:
Bethanie Hansen: This podcast is for educators, academics, and parents, who know that online teaching can be challenging, but it can also be rewarding, engaging, and fun! Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hansen. And I’ll be your guide for online teaching tips, topics, and strategies. Walk with me into the Online Teaching Lounge.
Hello, there, I’m Dr. Bethanie Hansen. And I’m here to talk with you today about a common online teaching dilemma. That is the difference between efficiency strategies and personalization in online teaching. I’ll cover that pair of topics that seem to be in opposition, and then I’ll offer eight ideas to help you streamline special student populations and strategies.
We all know that online teaching can be done anytime and anywhere. And for that reason, many people actually do take their computer just about everywhere they go. Perhaps we’ve got that laptop open while the family is watching TV for the night or hanging out together. Maybe we take it with us or use our smartphone to access the university or school app. And we probably post in discussion forums, answer questions, and meet students’ needs at all hours of the day and night. I’ve been there myself having taught online for 12 years, I have experienced that kind of feeling where it’s great to have the freedom to take your devices everywhere and really be prompt in your responses. And it certainly cuts down on the workload when you’re back in that online classroom. Who wouldn’t want that, right?
The problem is when we’re working anytime, anywhere, the other people in our life get the message that they’re no longer important to us, because while we’re with them, we’re working. Even if we’re sitting next to someone on the couch chatting and we just happen to glance at our smartphone and see a message from a student and answer it. That’s just interrupted the relationship at hand. An unanticipated outcome might be that our lives fall apart because we’re teaching anytime, anywhere or all the time and everywhere. And really, it’s about the work life balance and strategies to maintain efficiency so that we can do a great job, to meet our students needs and really help them along their path of learning without overwhelming ourselves or destroying all of the time outside the workday.
The idea that online education can kind of permeate everything we do, it makes me a big fan of efficiency strategies. I’ve also presented several sessions at conferences and university webinars at my institution about this. And in my full-time job, I have in the past led large teams of online faculty and coached many of them on efficiency strategies.
One of the tips I regularly offer is to always have at least one day of the week where you do not check your messages or go into that online classroom, because we need to refresh. That that gives us renewal, and we need the space away from the classroom.
While we need work-life balance and presence in our personal lives, there are many strategies and tools now available to help us to become more efficient in our online teaching and do things in ways that reduce the time we spend doing it. At the same time, the most important part of any kind of education is connecting with the learner himself and herself, connecting with that person that we’re teaching, and the whole group. And ensuring that those people are having a transformative experience, that they’re learning, that they’re growing, and that they’re feeling connected to us as their mentor and teacher, and really getting somewhere with their education. That flies in the face of setting limits and using efficiency because efficiency by its very nature can often use strategies that sort of depersonalize our online teaching approach.
And efficiency is all about speed and effectiveness, running through things quickly. So, I advocate efficiency strategies with relationships in mind, those relationships we have with our students who are critical. And we should not sacrifice the relationships in the name of efficiency.
When I talk about relationships with students, what I’m referring to is the connection in the classroom, but also the availability we have outside of the class. And where does that availability show up online? It can often show up in the message area of a learning management system, it can show up in your email, it can show up in a question area. It might also be that we’re picking up the phone to speak with a student or while we’re video chatting, or maybe we have an open office hour where we have the video open, whether it’s Zoom or some other platform.
So, there are a lot of ways we can connect with our students well formally and informally. The critical element is that they feel they can trust us and know who we are. They’re feeling guided by us. And we’re taking the time to actually learn what their needs and challenges are and see them as people not just names flying through the classroom.
Now, if you moved a live class online recently, you might already have a physical, face-to-face relationship with your students. Unless you have a super large class like a lecture-style class. So, if you have a small group, even up to 30 people, chances are you know who they are and you may already have that rapport. But what if you’re just teaching online for the first time, and have never met those people in person? That takes a little bit more effort.
Some of those things that we do to get to know our students in those circumstances are going to happen entirely in that online space. We might have like an icebreaker discussion or an introductory discussion during the first week, where people can share things about themselves. And we can get to know them better. In situations throughout the class, we want to look back over that discussion and remember who they are, where they’re living, what their situations are.
In a class I’m teaching right now, I made a list of my students in a notebook and added comments to help me remember their preferred names and other details that might be relevant like where they are living, whether they mentioned that they are working or serving in the military, and what they are majoring in for their degree.
And if a student comes to us with a special circumstance, like an illness, or an emergency, that’s something I would take the time to make a note of that. So, I can be more sensitive in the way that I follow up about assignments or outreach efforts.
Balancing the personal connection we make with people, and the efficiency strategies is really kind of the happy medium, the teeter totter of online teaching.
Now that we have touched on this basic area, I’m going to share a few things about working with special kinds of students or special situations. And some of this is based on my own teaching experience and expertise as an online educator, as well as my years of supervising and observing online faculty.
So, a lot of times in my previous supervisory role, I would occasionally receive a student complaint about something and through the investigation of that complaint, it might have come to light that maybe the student misunderstood, or the faculty member was not clear, or something happened in between. It regularly seemed like a lot of those things could be alleviated with a proactive approach to meet people where they’re at, recognizing that not all students are at the same stage of life or readiness for the online class. In fact, there are eight special situations that might each require a different type of response in order to more effectively work with the student in a positive relationship and also manage your educator’s efficiency strategies, these range from special student populations to teacher practices.
The eight areas I’ll mention today include:
- Adult learners
- Students with disabling conditions
- Communication plans
- Reaching out to missing students
- Guide students with time and task management
- Notice students new to the subject matter
- Plan ahead to accommodate potential interruptions
- Expect challenges and misunderstandings
1. Adult Learners
Adult learners are actually a lot different than younger students. When we have a population of say, 18- to 20-something-year-old students that we would call our traditional students, these people typically come right out of high school and go to college, or they might come just within a few years. They’re fairly young. And often they’re already in the mindset for learning. So, they know what to expect about schooling because they’ve recently been involved in school. And maybe they’ve even prepared for college and set a goal to get there. Now, of course, that’s not everyone, but that’s kind of a general understanding.
An adult learners, in contrast, are 25 and up. But we find that like the average is usually in the mid-30s and older. The university where I teach, we do have a large population of adult learners. So, I have a lot of experience with the stories they bring and the ways they learn and also their chief concerns, when they have concerns, about teaching and learning in the online classroom.
To help adult student online learners, first, I would make a screencast to walk through all of the critical parts of the classroom before the first day. There are a lot of free apps out there, such as Screencastify and Loom. Both of these have free options and are worth exploring to help you record classroom video walkthroughs and to show students where discussions will be held, where announcements might be, where assignments can be found, and the main way to contact you. All students really want to know how to contact you and what they need to turn in for credit and for a grade, not only adult learners. But creating a video guide is especially helpful for this group.
Another thing I suggest throughout all the classes you teach, if you do have adult learners in your classroom, is to provide step-by-step instructions for everything, so they understand exactly what the process is going to be as well as the purpose of the assignment. Explaining the learning goals and objectives and how the assignment will meet their own goals is important because adults want to know the value of every activity. They really don’t want to do anything that would be considered busy work or work without a clear purpose. It is a waste of time for them and to make it meaningful and to get their buy-in, all you need to do is tell them what it’s for and what it’s all about. It’s really that simple. So, helping them out by seeing their needs and giving them those step-by-step instructions and video guides will go a long way towards helping adult learners.
2. Students with Disabling Conditions
Students who have disabling conditions or need accommodations vary in their needs, and some students will come to you with accommodation requests from a Disability Compliance Office. Or maybe a student will just tell you they need something broken down into steps, they need an example, they need additional help. But either way, you will have students who might need this kind of help because either the student will tell you or a disability office representative will tell you.
One way to help them is to get to know them and what their needs actually are. Another way to help a student with a disability is to observe the way they’re participating in learning activities and the way they show up in your classroom. Do they log in every day? Do they participate in dialogue? Do they post close to the end of the week? Do they seem like they need a little additional time with things? The more observant you are about all of your students, the more you can connect with them and help them. And students with disabilities especially need your help because you’re the first point of contact and noticing what kind of help they might benefit from. And, also, they’re expecting you to be kind, kind and alert to their needs especially if they’ve communicated those things. So definitely work to be aware and observant.
Anyone who does have a clear need for accommodations of some kind will benefit from your regular outreach and your follow ups. It’s not only going to help them academically, but it’s going to make a huge difference in their lives, as knowing you’re a person who cares about their wellbeing and cares about their learning. We all need that, don’t we? And then lastly, if there is a disability plan given to you, no matter what age level or grade, it is very important to follow that disability plan. It’s critical and can actually be a legal compliance issue.
3. Communication Plans
Communication is a third area when you’re trying to assist students who might need additional help in your online classes and get that personal connection so that efficiency strategies can work and not distance you from your students. Communication plans help you connect students to anything out there that’s going to help them be part of a community, and to give them support services, like tutoring and writing labs if they exist. If they don’t exist, there are a lot of things you might find on the internet you can refer them to. And it’s definitely worth your time to communicate those out. Now is a great time to think about different kinds of tools and things that students can benefit from and communicate those things to your students.
Another communication consideration is to provide coaching-style comments, in your announcements, in your messages, and in your feedback on assignments and other things. Every time you communicate with students, communicating with them as a coach will remind you to include tips on how to be a great student, how to plan ahead for the next assignment, how your students can check in with you about how they’re doing in the class, how to prepare for whatever they’re going to do with this knowledge, and many other topics.
Coaching type of behaviors can include addressing things we consider soft skills, whether it’s communication habits in the discussion area, or it could be professional skills like time management and how to format assignments for professionalism. But all these kinds of things you share with students will help them in life and work and definitely in your class. If you can share them in an encouraging way, it goes a long way. If it’s just critiquing and feedback, it kind of misses the mark. So, tone is very important in the way we communicate to all of our students and especially when they need our help.
4. Reach Out to Missing Students
A fourth thing to think about when assisting students online, is missing students. It’s a best practice to contact everyone individually during the first week of your online time together. If you’ve just recently moved a class online, and you haven’t had a chance to check in with everyone, now would be a great time to do that. If your class started out online, hopefully that happened during the first week of class. I know a lot of folks who would like to use the first week for an academic assignment and an academic topic in the discussion area. If you do that, you still might add something separate that allows people just to socialize, to get to know each other and share a little bit of something so that they feel kind of special and actually look forward to being with others in the class. Finding a way to connect everyone builds the community feeling and it sets the tone for the rest of your class.
After week one, some students may slack in their participation or disappear from your online class with their name still showing up on the roster. Another best practice is to reach out by email, message, or telephone to contact students if they disengage in the class. So, after the first week is the best time to begin looking for abnormal participation or missing students because online a lot of time can pass before we might otherwise notice a disengaged student or reach out. And when the student stops participating, they might feel like they are quickly falling so far behind, they lose hope about being able to catch up or complete the class. Any time you start seeing people disengage in a class online, that’s a critical time to reach out, whether it’s a message or a phone call. And this contact can make all the difference. And at lots of schools, there is an advisor somewhere to whom we can also forward that student’s details to ask for some backup, some support.
I’m currently teaching an online course that is in week 3 of the class. And it’s my habit to write down students’ names and a few notes that help me remember their unique situations. Along with that, I’ll write down whether I connected with each student during the week to be sure that every two or three weeks I’ve had a substantial connection, replied to their discussions, or had some other method of engaging. And in my current class, I noticed one student did not participate in the week 2 discussion. At the beginning of week 3, I sent her a note to tell her that I missed her in the discussion and ask if she needed help. Within a day, she replied with an explanation of some unexpected things that kept her from class and she committed to be more involved. And she did a very nice job of participating in the third week. I’m not sure what her participation might have been like without the outreach, but I feel good about helping her reengage and believe that the contact made a difference.
5. Guide Students with Time and Task Management
Another thing that we can do to help our online students in a personal way, while we’re coaching them and helping them, especially if they are new to online learning, is we can help them with their time and task management. Time management has to do with how students are regularly entering the online classroom, completing their learning activities, and managing their discussions and other assignments.
And task management is how students break down the things they need to do to get them done. An example of this might be when you have to read 100 pages, you might have to break it down over two or three days if you don’t sit well and read for hours. If you’re going to do a big assignment, you might have to break that task down and work on a draft, and then an outline, and then write the entire assignment. We can go a long way working with our online students in managing time and tasks.
In this area, I would suggest that you give a sample work plan in weekly announcements so that your students kind of know what to expect. At one institution where I was a part-time faculty member, I used to give them Monday through Friday outlines. On Monday, I suggest that you read this and take this quiz; on Tuesday, I suggest that you do this; by Wednesday, I suggest you post in your discussion forum and take the second quiz. And everything’s due by Friday. But I would give these suggested days to kind of break it down for them.
And I had a lot of students thank me and tell me that they really appreciated that kind of support and suggestions because they weren’t necessarily good planners. And it was very helpful to see how it could look. Other students didn’t need it and probably disregarded it and did it their own way and that’s okay too. But giving that kind of help for time, and task management is definitely a real benefit to help all types of students succeed.
6. Notice Students New to the Subject Matter
We also have, whatever the subject matter, students newer to the subject area and how they might struggle on the class. In my subject, music appreciation, I provide students who have absolutely no music background or experience with additional links and video guides to help them better understand terms like tempo, melody, and harmony. And in your subject matter, whatever it is you’re teaching, there are going to be folks that are familiar with the subject matter or very good at it. And there are always going to be people who are either anxiety riddled about what they’re going to learn, or they just are inexperienced in that subject matter. So, whatever it is, provide ample resources to define, illustrate, explain, and teach basic concepts in that academic discipline. In my case, I would give a lot of music examples to find the music terms and kind of give some idea of how to use and apply them.
Another way to help students who struggle more with the subject area would be to provide live lecture opportunities. These could either be replacements for the week’s discussion, whether you give them the grade for being at the live lecture, and don’t have the requirement for the discussion or make the discussion optional for those who can’t attend the live lecture. Or you could do the live lecture and record it so that everyone who can’t attend can still get the information.
If you do a live lecture, then you can explain further on the fly. And you can give a lot more detail that people are going to appreciate later. And they can rewind and rewatch that. Most video systems now create transcripts for your live lecture, like Kaltura, YouTube, and others. And you can always turn on a dictation program on a smartphone while you’re doing your live lecture and it will take some dictation as well. I encourage you to explore live lectures. They really don’t always work well as mandatory measures, especially when people live in multiple time zones. But they can be a great way to support what you’re doing and to give additional help to those who are interested.
7. Plan Ahead to Accommodate Potential Interruptions
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the students I taught were first responders, and so I expected that they might be intermittent with their participation and they might need extra time at the end of the class to finish. There might be interruptions where they’re not able to show up the way they would normally. But there are also other things, like there could be food or financial insecurity. A student might be a young person, if you’re teaching a lower grade group, they might just need a lot more help and be dependent on their parent or the others at home for their technology or for the time to get things done.
Many adult learners work while taking classes or may have unpredictable schedules. There are so many ways that things interrupt a typical online learner’s life. So, if possible, be flexible with your online learners, it doesn’t mean that you never have a late penalty and it doesn’t mean that you just let students do whatever. You can have guidelines and policies in the classroom and need to support academic rigor. But the more you can work with special situations, the more they’re going to learn that you’re human. And they’re going to get much more out of that experience with you. So, maintain some flexibility with students who have emergencies. And if needed, refer students out to their advisor, the counselor at the school you’re working with, or support services like the chaplain or advising or disability services, whatever seems appropriate and fits your situation.
8. Expect Challenges and Misunderstandings
And lastly, this should come as no surprise, but in any situation, there are going to be people who misunderstand us or take issue with what we’re doing. And I call those challenging students. So, a challenging student is someone who, in the teacher’s perspective, presents as being either argumentative or difficult, or maybe even hostile. And in my former role, as a faculty director, I saw students occasionally appear to be challenging. Based on my experience, the first thing a challenging student wants is to be heard and understood. Even if the message is coming across in a way that seems inappropriate. If we can focus on what they’re trying to say, before we address the hostility, then we can get somewhere because we’re seeing the student as a human being, and they know it. And we might learn something very helpful that de-escalates the entire situation.
Most of the time, I found that the student was very upset mainly due to one misunderstanding that continued over time and was never cleared up. When we focus only on the behavior, it’s very hard to turn that around and difficult to have a productive conversation. And it’s also difficult to make any changes. So even though it seems contradictory to what our instincts might tell us, I would suggest looking for the message first, worrying about the behavior second, unless it’s overly threatening. And then there might be other choices that need to happen.
I always recommend reaching out privately to a challenging student and not shaming them in a public discussion in an online forum form by calling them out in front of others, but actually sending like a private message, or just picking up the phone. And also model really professional and authentic responses and behavior. I see this kind of urge that online educators sometimes have when we feel threatened by someone’s hostility or disagreement or even just challenging a grade, it can be really easy for us to pull back and go in our box and get defensive. And then we’re no longer modeling what we want the student to be doing to us. So, it’s critical to not step back into that box and not get closed off. But really be open to still seeing the student as a human and really meeting them on that level so they can be heard.
And then consider your response before you send an email. Because especially if a student’s being very challenging, it can be difficult to think clearly. And something we might say that we think is coming across clearly actually could sound quite hostile from us. As you work with students who appear challenging, it’s also a good idea to involve your dean, principal, director, or whoever your manager or supervisor is, to seek support and advice. You have very likely a whole team of colleagues out there that you can reach out to. And if you don’t, and you want encouragement with what you’re doing, feel free to send me a quick email. You can reach me on my website at BethanieHansen.com and I’m happy to hear from you.
As we close out today’s podcast, remember that we don’t have to sacrifice connection and relationships for efficiency in our online teaching, and both efficiency and connection matter. When we plan ahead, what our strategies will be, we become much more efficient without losing sight of those we are teaching. And taking the time to get to know our students in the first week will help us carry that into the entire class. I thank you for being here today and I hope that you will share this podcast with your colleagues who teach online. We want to continue supporting online educators in their work and can’t do that without your help in sharing the podcast.
Take some time to subscribe for regular updates as our episodes come out each Wednesday. In the coming week, I wish you all the best in balancing efficiency and personalization in working with your students to ensure their needs are met and you are connecting with them on a personal level. I know it’s going to bring greater meaning and depth to what you’re doing in the online format and help you find more satisfaction connecting with those people you’re teaching. Best wishes in your online teaching this coming week!
This is Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge podcast. To share comments and requests for future episodes, please visit bethaniehansen.com/request. Best wishes this coming week in your online teaching journey.
by Bethanie Hansen | Best practices, Online Education Trends, Podcast, Teaching Online
This content first appeared at APUEdge.Com.
Podcast with Dr. Bethanie L. Hansen, Department Chair, School of Arts, Humanities and Education
Agility and continuous improvement are essential parts of online education to meet students’ needs now and in the future, and these attributes require a knowledge of online education best practices, awareness of students’ needs, goals, and challenges, and a regular habit of learning and reflection. In this episode, APU professor Dr. Bethanie Hansen shares highlights from the first 99 episodes of the Online Teaching Lounge podcast, a countdown of listeners’ top 5 favorite episodes, and ways in which we’re celebrating our 100th episode.
Listen to the Episode:
Subscribe to Online Teaching Lounge
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | Pandora
Read the Transcript:
Dr. Bethanie Hansen: This podcast is for educators, academics and parents who know that online teaching can be challenging, but it can also be rewarding, engaging, and fun. Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hansen, and I’ll be your guide for online teaching tips, topics and strategies. Walk with me into the Online Teaching Lounge.
Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. This is our 100th episode, and we’re celebrating!
Today, we will reflect on highlights from the first 99 episodes of the Online Teaching Lounge podcast, which began with its first episode in April 2020. We’ll dive into listeners’ top 5 favorite episodes, which help you to know about online teaching topics trending in our podcast and which listeners have chosen most often. And, we’ll close out our 100th episode today with some fun ways we’re celebrating this milestone.
Highlights from Our First 99 Episodes
Looking back, the Online Teaching Lounge podcast began April 15, 2020. I started the podcast to contribute some of my own experience and professional expertise to help educators and parents who were turning to online platforms to keep education moving forward during lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Schools and higher education institutions everywhere sent students home and taught them virtually, using a variety of methods. And, parents were also asked to teach their children remotely with lessons given by teachers or schools, which was a significant challenge. It was these circumstances that launched our podcast and why we continue to focus on five major topical areas in the podcast over time.
After those first 25 episodes, our talented team of professionals coordinated by American Public University began sponsoring and producing our podcast. This helped us to significantly increase the quality of each episode and provided transcripts so that you could also read the materials we produce every week. I’ll mention some of these skilled professionals at the end of today’s episode.
One of our main topic areas is 1) best practices. We also have four other main topic areas for the Online Teaching Lounge podcast. These are: 2) reaching students, 3) using video and other technologies, 4) professional development for the online educator, and 5) wellbeing and work-life balance when teaching and working online. We have covered many topics win these five areas to get you teaching online, help you learn the basics and best practices, and learn how to transfer your face-to-face class into a great online course.
We have taken a deep dive into engaging your learners, with episodes that help you ask great questions and try creative approaches. We have explored the area of online discussions many times to help you keep these fresh and avoid the repetition of standard discussion approaches. A few episodes have specifically focused on the needs of military and veteran students, students who are new to online learning, and adult learners.
We have covered synchronous and hybrid online learning, as well as a heavy focus on asynchronous online courses. And, we have focused on K-12 education and higher education. We have walked through curriculum planning, adding videos and video conferencing, and integrating multimedia apps.
One area that I’m especially pleased to have brought you through the Online Teaching Lounge podcast is a focus on your wellbeing and your work-life balance. In this area, we have focused on your energy and managing your online teaching time. Some of the topics to help you enjoy your online work are these:
And, of course, we have even shared tips to help you with some of the tricky tasks everyone encounters when teaching online. These include giving effective essay feedback, handling academic integrity and plagiarism, managing course extension requests, and increasing student retention and success.
In the first 100 episodes of our podcast, you will find a wealth of tips, strategies, tools, and guidance to help you teach online effectively and enjoy your work. And, we invite you to send your feedback about any of these previous episodes, as well as your requests of topics for future episodes, through my website at BethanieHansen.com/Request. One of the best parts of our podcast is knowing that we support you in what you need and being able to present content that will keep you going.
Counting Down the Top 5 Listener Favorites
The topics we bring you come from a variety of sources, covering anything from tried-and-true experience and researched best practices to trending topics and issues. But you might be wondering what other online educators find most valuable and important. To help answer this question, we’re going to count down the top five episodes of our listeners, as shown in the listeners statistics:
#5: Episode 28, 5 Ways to Make Online Forum Discussions More Creative. In this episode, we took a deep dive into discussions that almost every online course provides, especially asynchronous online classes. The first and most important idea is that an educator who participates in the discussion early in the week sets the tone for students to get involved. And this tends to lead to much more engagement and a lively discussion.
Another tip is to be creative with your first week’s discussion to encourage students to interact with you and with each other, as well as to create psychological safety for your students. Additionally, you might consider scaffolding complexity in your discussions, from the early weeks of class toward the final week, to foster critical thinking and further develop psychological safety in your online class.
This episode also featured some creative approaches, like using case studies and alternative histories in discussions, and hosting debates. The goal here is that we all know discussions are a great way to connect students to each other and to their faculty member who is teaching the class, but we really want to get out of that rut of repetitive formats or using the same type of prompts all the time.
#4: Episode 2, “The Online Education Dilemma-Efficiency vs. Connection.” In this episode, we dove into some of the areas that tend to overload online educators, such as the need to be online all of the time to help us do a great job, meet our students’ needs, and still have time for life outside of work day.
Some of the tips from this episode include taking at least one day completely offline for a clear separation from work and an opportunity to refresh, finding ways to connect with individual learners to help them have transformative learning experiences, and communicating your availability to establish those expectations with your learners. This episode focuses on ways in which you can streamline your practices and yet focus on your relationships with students as a priority.
#3: Episode 1, “Time Management for Online Teaching.” In this episode, I mentioned the book I wrote on Teaching Music Appreciation Online, published by Oxford University Press. The topic of time management was covered in that book, and I shared tips from chapter 15. These include creating a master schedule to plan your daily management of online teaching, making a grid of your various teaching activities to schedule that out, and reviewing multiple obligations you might have.
This episode also shares suggestions for efficiency strategies, like using grading tools, dictation software, a grading toolbar like GradeAssist, a Microsoft Word add-in, to help you use time well and enjoy your online teaching. And, I want you to know that I use all of these strategies myself as well, and I find them especially productive for efficiency while promoting connection.
#2: Episode 38, Asking Great Questions Can Improve Student Engagement. In this episode, we explored how asking great questions can up level your teaching in the online environment. Many of us know that asking great questions can be a great practice, and it happens in discussions. Sometimes we ask questions in our feedback. We might ask questions during a live synchronous session.
There are many ways we ask questions when we’re teaching, but particularly when we’re teaching online. In this episode, we talk about why asking good questions is important, and even we also talk about how to create great questions, which can be challenging. And lastly, we use a strategy to turn any statement into a question to make your teaching even more effective.
#1: Episode 33, Andragogy in Online Education and Strategies for Teaching Adult Learners. Andragogy is an approach to teaching the adult learner that is quite different from pedagogy and in this episode I cover those differences.
We address why we should care about andragogy, how it helps our students, how it helps us. And then some ideas to help you apply it; some ideas from the presentation I attended at the Online Learning Consortium’s Accelerate conference in the fall of 2020, and also some from my own experience.
Adult learners are essentially different from our typical college-age population of the 18-to-25 year old group, and understanding this, we can reach them where they are. We can meet their needs much better, and we can be a lot more creative about the kinds of work that we guide them through so that they walk away with things that are relevant and that they can apply to their real life and their professional endeavors. They can learn it and use it immediately and keep using it into the future. And perhaps one reason that this particular episode is the #1 listener favorite at the Online Teaching Lounge is the fact that adult learners often seek out online education, and we need to be able to support them effectively.
How We are Celebrating our 100th Episode
Celebrating our 100th episode is an opportunity to express gratitude. There are many people who make this weekly series possible, and I’m taking the time to let you know who they are and to thank them for what they contribute.
At American Public University, Leischen Kranick is a leader in supporting and working with our podcast. Leischen brings excitement to her work and helps me develop helpful topics and ideas focused on what you, our listeners, need most in your online teaching and work. Thank you, Leischen, for the work you do to make our podcast happen, and for being a champion of all of our podcasts at American Public University and American Military University. And a big “thank you” to Andi Crowe, who manages scheduling and many other parts of our podcast effort as well.
At Harvest Creative Services, Mark Miller, Colleen Murray, and Bob Miller have been valuable contributors to the quality of our sound and final production. And Mark, thank you for the way you work and your ability to adapt at times and keep us rolling.
Our theme music is called “Lead the Way” and is licensed through Melody Loops. We appreciate Sascha Giebel who wrote the music.
During our first 100 episodes, we had several guests. Our guests have included faculty members Dr. Lisset Bird-Pickens and Dr. Greg Mandalas, Department Chairs Dr. Jan Spencer, Dr. Kathleen Tate, and Dr. Jackie Fowler. Faculty Directors. Dr. Doris Blanton and Dr. Craig Bogar, one of our university chaplains Kyle Sorys.
We also had recent guests who have worked in student affairs and other higher education leadership roles, and who are also faculty members with us at APU, including Dr. Barry Dotson, Dr. Sean Bogel, Dr. David Ferreira, and Dr. Scott Kalicki, each of whom were invited guests of my colleague Dr. Jan Spencer. We recognize our Dean, Dr. Grace Glass, and my colleague Dr. Bjorn Mercer who is also a podcaster here at American Public University, and our Provost Dr. Vernon Smith.
Thank you for being a listener of the Online Teaching Lounge, and for the important work you do changing lives through the power of education at a distance. This is great and challenging work, and we need committed educators to continue reaching students and helping them learn, grow, and develop their potential, especially when delivering education online. We appreciate you. And thank you for what you do!
As we close this 100th episode, I wish you all the best in your online teaching this week, and I invite you to keep listening as we continue to bring you tips, topics, and strategies to help you in your online teaching for many more episodes to come. This is Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge Podcast. To share comments and requests for future episodes, please visit bethaniehansen.com/request. Best wishes this coming week in your online teaching journey.
by Dr. Bethanie Hansen | Best practices, Energy, Healthy Habits, Higher Education, Life, Podcast, Students, Teaching Online, Time Managment
This content initially appeared on APUEDGE.COM.
Teaching online can be overwhelming and cause a significant amount of work-related stress. In the first part of this three-part series, Dr. Bethanie Hansen discusses teaching strategies to help online educators prioritize their time by engaging students first. Learn about using a Community of Inquiry framework, keeping written notes about students and your interaction with them, and the benefits of using backwards mapping to ensure you’re meeting objectives and connecting regularly with students.
Subscribe to Online Teaching Lounge
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | Pandora
Read the Transcript:
Dr. Bethanie Hansen: This podcast is for educators, academics, and parents who know that online teaching can be challenging, but it can also be rewarding, engaging, and fun. Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hansen, and I’ll be your guide for online teaching tips, topics, and strategies. Walk with me into the Online Teaching Lounge.
Welcome to the episode today for the Online Teaching Lounge. We’re in year two of this podcast, and it is very exciting to support you in your online teaching efforts. You’re not alone here. You might feel alone teaching online as it can be very isolating to do that, but we’re here for you and hopefully you’ll get some tools and strategies and encouragement by listening to this podcast today.
We’re at the beginning of a three-part mini-series. Today is part one. We’ll talk about work-life balance and how you can set priorities for your very top priority as an online educator. This will be about engaging with students first.
Next episode, we will talk about work-life balance in setting priorities to produce assets that can guide your students to manage themselves.
And lastly, also in work-life balance, we will talk about setting priorities to use time management strategies effectively, managing your workload.
These three areas are going to support you a lot in your work-life balance. As online educators, we know that we can teach any time anywhere, and it’s very easy for us to have the online classroom follow us to all places that we go and kind of pop into all places in our lives.
There’s been a lot of research done in online teaching, and even though it offers attractive flexibility for you as the instructor, all kinds of instructors out there report high teaching workloads, feeling isolated, having high stress levels, and having generally poor life-work balance.
There’s a lot of assumptions about online learners out there we can use to our advantage, especially when we’re working with adult learners, and those come from andragogy theory. There are also some frameworks that help us as online educators and we’re going to look at the community of inquiry framework to give us some practical application as we’re taking this tour in our three-part mini-series.
We can also look at some areas outside of online education, like the work-life balance theories. There’s been some research done in that area. And then lastly, we can think about the kinds of boundaries that would support your work and simultaneously allow you to focus on your student success as a priority. I personally believe that when you set boundaries in the online classroom and in your online teaching generally by prioritizing what matters most, developing assets to help your students guide themselves, and managing your time efficiently and carefully, you can have better definition to your work. And you can also focus your efforts, which means you’re going to do a better job as an online educator and you might even enjoy it a lot more. So here we go with part one, engaging with students first.
When we think about engaging with students first, there are some things about work-life balance for online employees that also apply to our online educators here. In some of the research done about working online, there was a little collection of strategies people were using to have good work-life balance.
Of course, there were some that were provided by the employers, but those were pretty few. The most successful strategies came from the employees themselves. These are called employee originated solutions. Now, employee originating solutions means that you have the locus of control. You’re the boss of what you do for these solutions, how much you use them and how you manage them. And the most popular employee originating solutions for online workers that were effective, were mindfulness strategies, self-reflection, and meditation. And these could be either prompted by the employer or just come up with by the employee themselves.
These are going to increase your mental and emotional presence in the online classroom and just working online generally. It’ll also increase your mental and emotional presence in your personal life and reduce the interference of work-related stress.
Now, when I say there’s interference from work-related stress, I mean we might be thinking about our online work when we’re not actually doing it. We might have emails pop up that stress us out because we think, “Oh, we have to go online right now.”
Chances are this has happened to you if you’ve worked online very long. It’s pervasive and we think because we can read those messages anytime, we should do it to keep our workload under control. But we don’t realize that when we’re doing those things, the stress is creeping in and we’re feeling all that stress all day long in our personal life too. Before you know it, we think we need to be working all the time throughout the day just to keep the workload manageable. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Really there are a lot of ways we can reduce that stress and create less pressure in our work life.
So thinking about this, we’re going to talk about connecting with our students first. This is going to be the top priority for us as online educators. And I’m going to share just a few tips with you today. Then I encourage you to come back next week for episode 55 when we will talk about producing assets that guide your students to manage themselves.
Understanding the Community of Inquiry Framework
Now let’s look at the framework that is really common or popular in online education, the Community of Inquiry framework. This framework gives us a practical model that we can use to design how we involve ourselves in the classroom. How we engage with our students.
The Community of Inquiry framework focuses on teaching, social, and cognitive presence as priorities. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. If you’re in higher education, it’s very likely that you have. Each of these presences within the COI model, the teaching, social, and cognitive presences, work together in an interrelated way. So they work together in ways where we often are meeting two or three presences all at once through our activities. And we’re going to support our students in their learning experiences by focusing in these areas even more precisely.
Social Presence
Social presence is about the way your learners can engage in a comfortable learning environment and feel supported and trust you as the educator and feel like they can collaborate with others in that environment.
Teaching Presence
Teaching presence is about your ability as the educator to design and facilitate the online class. So what you run and put announcements out there and guide them in their assignments and all of those things is part of your teaching presence.
Cognitive Presence
And lastly, cognitive presence is the way learners can construct new meaning through the process of learning. So that means they’re doing some things that draw the points together, connecting the dots, making even more connections to the subject matter. And you can promote that as an educator in a lot of different ways.
When you are designing and facilitating a course online and you’re thoughtful about connectedness to what the learners need and what they already know, you can use the CoI framework to plan what you’re going to do thinking about your social, teaching, and cognitive presence. This is going to give you a lot of space to prioritize what’s really important and make the best of your time spent in the online classroom.
Now, if you take a thoughtful approach like using a framework such as the CoI I’ve mentioned here, you can plan your activities around those key areas. If you don’t do that, it’s very easy to resort to a to-do list. Maybe we’ve got a to-do list of things to grade, things to post, comments to write, announcements to post.
And when we have that to-do list that’s just a checkbox approach, it’s really easy for us to lose track of the bigger picture, what we’re really trying to accomplish as the educator. The framework helps us to ground ourselves in the goal of connecting with our students, promoting the cognitive aspects of what we’re doing and also helping them get to know us as faculty or as instructors. So our first priority is to engage with the students first.
Engaging with Students First
There are some strategies that will help you engage with your students first. Some of these could be posting and replying early each day in the discussion. Of course reading messages and emails that your students send you early in the day will also help you to address any serious concerns that your students have. This is going to build trust. If you make weekly notes about your students and add some things that you’re figuring out about them, it will help you get to know them better.
You can also use a strategy called backwards mapping and use it to plan your workload. The workload’s pretty high when you’re teaching online. There’s a lot to read and write and grade and a lot of time to spend because when you’re not meeting face to face, you’re going to replace that with a lot of written work and other types of online interactivity. So there’s more to grade, more to do, more to read.
Because of this kind of workload, you want to decide where to start in your teaching tasks. This will help you avoid being overwhelmed and quickly burning out. When you engage with students first as your top priority, this is going to help you establish your teaching presence and your social presence. If you don’t have those two areas when you’re creating your course, when you’re engaging with students, it’s very difficult to bump things up to that next level of cognitive presence to help students adopt critical thinking and really be engaged in the underlying aim of all those educational activities that you’ve planned.
Consider Posting to the Classroom Every Morning
So you might consider starting the day with a post in the discussion forum for each class you’re teaching and responding to all the messages and emails. If you post early in any class you teach every work day, this means you’ve been responsive, you’ve got a presence that is regular, and you’re not going to forget to engage with your students. After all, the more you engage, the more you build relationships and you guide them by teaching them in that subject area.
Most of the institutions with online learning have some kind of expectations of you as the instructor. Maybe they want you to be in the classroom a certain number of days or in the discussion area a certain number of days. There might be some kind of guideline to that where you’re working now or where you’re teaching now.
In my own work, I’ve noticed that if students haven’t participated in the weekly discussion yet, I go in there and post an initial thread with some kind of encouragement to get started in the discussion. Maybe a current event that ties to the topic or something else of interest. This helps my students to just start getting into that discussion and readily engage in the dialogue. So we’ve got the academic community and it’s growing because I’ve created the starter and I’ve also helped them to see me and feel like I’m there helping them out.
This is true when my post asks them to reflect or apply the topic or connect to some kind of current event. These all satisfy andragogy theory and meet the needs of adult learners, and also they build cognitive presence.
Maintain Collection of “Starter” Threads and Written Notes about Students
Now, if you’re teaching the course repeatedly, you teach that same topic over and over again each time you teach this class, you might want to maintain a collection of well-developed starter threads that you can use every time students don’t appear to be engaged. So when you need to start a thread for the week, it’s nice when you’ve already researched one and you can kind of further tailor it for the class at hand and meet the needs of those students, but you’ve got something to start with.
Another tip to engage with your students first is to keep anecdotal records. When you post early each day and you build that priority of instructor presence and connecting with your students, you get to know your students as a priority. You’re applying andragogy throughout your teaching. And when you record notes, typically called anecdotal records, about your students, this will help you keep track of who they are. Especially if you’re teaching a lot of sections with a lot of students, it’s difficult to do this.
Some of them may not have a photo online and it’s difficult to get to know them or associate their name with their work. Keeping a written record of your students and things that you’re learning about them and also who you’ve replied to each week can help you to manage the touch that you want to have with each student effectively.
Your notes might include something like where the students are living, their backgrounds and interests, maybe their academic major, whether they’re in the military or working, whether they’re new parents, and any other pertinent details that you noticed that you care about.
If you write those details down, you can be sensitive in your responses. And when they reach out for extra help, you also have some level of context around who they are and what their situation in life is. Knowing their backgrounds can help you also remember that you’re working with real human beings, not just some names that show up online. This can help you to understand their problems and also their challenges when they reach out to you for special help. They are real. They do care about learning from you and knowing them a little bit better will help you to approach them in a way that lets them know you care about them.
When you connect students’ experiences and backgrounds to what you say in the class, this helps even more to establish your social presence because it helps the students feel known and it also gives you that human element as you communicate with them.
Your weekly student contacts are a best practice because these give you the space to identify any students you haven’t connected with recently or touched in the online class, and you can also determine who has become inactive in the course. You can follow up and reach out to help students re-engage in the class.
Anecdotal records of your contacts with students will help you to vary who you reach out to, who you look for, and who you follow up with, and eventually you’re going to touch everyone and remember the students you’ve taught long after the class has ended.
You might even benefit from using a notepad like EndNote Online or maybe an Excel document where you kind of use a spreadsheet approach. You could put these notations about your students there to keep track of them and even begin with week one when they give you their introduction so you’re just getting to know them.
Whatever process you use, the main goal is to really establish a relationship and keep yourself focused. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but I used to go to a dentist who would remember things about me when I hadn’t seen him in six months. I would sit down in that dentist chair, I believe I was 16 or 17 at the time, and he would ask me all about how school was going and different activities I was engaging in. At the time, I thought that man was a genius. Now that I’m older and I understand how those things are maintained, I realized that he was keeping anecdotal records so that he could follow up with me and build rapport. It’s difficult to work on someone’s teeth, as a dentist, if they’re afraid of you. But when you build rapport, trust is created and fear can reduce. That’s my estimation of what happened at the dentist, but it also happens in online education.
The more you convey that you know the student and you’re relating to them, and the more you connect socially by sharing your expertise and your thoughts about what’s going on as well, the more students build trust for you. They’re more than likely to reach out to you when they do have concerns instead of just dropping the class or disappearing and disengaging.
Backwards Mapping Techniques
The last area I want to share with you in this priority of connecting or engaging with your students first is to practice backwards mapping. Now, you might’ve heard this term before. Backwards mapping is something that Wiggins and McTighe came up with in a curriculum design process. The goal is that you’re going to look at what you want to achieve at the end of a class, you create this big picture view of the goals, and then you break them down into smaller tasks that need to be planned ahead of time to reach the goals.
Public school teachers use this strategy a lot when they’re choosing learning goals for their students. And of course, as I just mentioned, plan the desired date, the goals to be achieved, and move backwards to decide when to start the project, when to start the lesson, and when the bigger benchmark measurements need to happen.
Backwards mapping is a great strategy that can be used in planning your online teaching engagement productively. So not only is it a curricular tool, it is also a good planning tool for your involvement and your time management.
You can use backwards mapping to ensure that the requirements or goals you have for yourself professionally as an educator are met on time. For example, let’s just say you’re teaching a class of 50 students. That would be a pretty large class. And if you’re teaching a class of 50 students and you need to respond to everyone at least once during the week, if you’re online for five days of that week, you’ll probably want to make sure you’re connecting with 10 students per day. If that works for you to spread it out that way, then you could backwards map in that way and then on the last day of the week, check in and see if you have met your goal.
You can reply, you can grade this way by backwards mapping your approach to grading as well. You can also backwards map different things like posting announcements, logging in, and doing other follow-up pieces of your online teaching.
Backwards mapping assignments to be graded can really help you anticipate how many documents you’re going to evaluate and how many you would need to evaluate each day to return the graded work in a pretty timely manner and with the expected grading quality that you’re wanting to return to them. Take a look at backwards mapping. It’s a great strategy to help you reduce the overwhelm of the teaching load that you might have when you’re teaching online.
So, in summary, your priorities would be to post in discussions every day, early in the day, as your first priority to connect with your students. So engage with students first. Reply to messages, emails, and students questions before any other task.
Take anecdotal notes about your students from week one forums and throughout the course as things come up. Track the students you’ve responded to or touched each week and then follow up with missing or disengaged students. You can also use these strategies as you’re engaging with students first.
The first one is to set time management priorities. You might use a checklist to ensure that there are things that must be done and that they get done. Plan time for each commitment that you have on a schedule or in some kind of a planner, and then backwards map your engagement and your grading.
When you do these things by setting priorities and following strategies that work for you, you’ll be able to have work-life balance because the work is getting done in a focused manner and at a quality that helps you really connect with students and make a difference in your online teaching.
I appreciate you being here today. Thank you for listening to part one in our work-life balance three-part mini-series. Come back next week and we’ll talk about producing assets that guide your students in self-management. And I look forward to seeing you then. Best wishes this coming week in your online teaching.
This is Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge Podcast. To share comments and requests for future episodes, please visit bethaniehansen.com/request. Best wishes this coming week in your online teaching journey.
by Dr. Bethanie Hansen | Best practices, Higher Education, Podcast, Students, Teaching Online
This content originally appeared on APUEdge.com
Strong classroom management is especially important in the online environment. In this episode, Dr. Bethanie Hansen talks about the need for advanced planning in online classes to keep students informed about what to expect in the class and aid students in managing their own. Strong classroom management can also help teachers build relationships with students while helping them meet their learning objectives, whether it is professional advancement or personal growth.
Subscribe to Online Teaching Lounge
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher
Read the Transcript:
Dr. Bethanie Hansen: Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge, the show that helps you teach online with confidence and impact, while living a healthy, balanced life. I’m Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge.
I used to be a very busy online educator, student, mother, wife, and overwhelmed person. It’s easy to struggle with balance when working in teaching online, and I’ve definitely been there. Over time I’ve learned best practices, strategies to manage time and online work, and I’ve gained tools to help with life-work balance.
As a full-time professor and faculty director at an entirely online university, I help faculty teach with excellence and keep learning new ways to make online education a great opportunity for faculty and for students. Through this podcast today, I’m helping educators become more effective, healthy, and balanced so they can love what they do and impact their students positively. And today we’re going to do that by looking at the objectives, needs, and challenges of our online students, and how we can help them. And let’s get started.
What Motivates Online Students?
In the first area, let’s talk about online students’ motivations, their objective when they chose online education. Adult learners who choose online education really have two main objectives. They want to advance their professional careers, and to develop personally. Of course, there are many other motivations for taking courses online, but we find that these are the highest number of motivations.
Motivated by Career Advancement
When students are learning something to advance their careers, it really means they expect to get something tangible in the future, a reward for the learning they’re doing right now. That long-term reward might be a career change. It might be a salary increase. More opportunities. Or even the chance to get a promotion. This kind of vision for the future is going to help your online students to be intrinsically motivated so that they will be able to achieve the future reward that they really want.
Motivated by Personal Growth
When students are learning something for personal growth, there might be a need to develop personally, benefit from the continuous learning that takes place in a structured program or class, and have something to look forward to.
In a Wiley education survey published in 2020, 76% of those online students surveyed said that they wanted career advancement. Seventy percent of them were also looking for personal growth as well. It was said, while career advancement is the number one motivator for Wiley supported students when starting a program, personal growth keeps them going. That was reported in the Wiley study, and 59% stated that their desire to achieve personal growth motivated them to continue with their program after getting started.
We can help the students maintain their motivation by providing them with regular feedback throughout the course. It’s also particularly motivating when students feel like they’re learning things that matter to them.
Sometimes all it takes is telling them how a particular skill, or new information, is applicable to them now or in the future. But making clear connections between what students are learning and how they can use it really helps them meet their objectives and stay committed.
While online students have a high level of intrinsic motivation to learn so they can develop professionally and personally, they also need support throughout the entire experience. Let’s move on to the second area, which is what students online need, what they must get from you, their instructor, in an online learning experience.
What Do Students Need from Online Teachers?
Particularly, what are the needs of non-traditional students and adult learners? First, it might surprise you, but one thing they really need is good classroom management. This comes from Daniel P. Stewart, an adjunct history and humanities professor at Fayetteville Technical Community College. He said that advanced planning, interesting and relevant lessons, and effective teaching are critical.
Now why do adult learners need these things? In my first teaching position, I attended a middle school educators conference during which Fred Jones taught us about using the physical classroom space for classroom management. His idea was that moving through the room regularly and being physically near each student often during the class, behavior concerns would be dramatically reduced, and engagement would increase.
While that was 25 years ago, a similar idea is still helpful today in online classrooms, and even with adult learners. Classroom management is about planning ahead to communicate and help things go right. In the example I shared about the middle school classes 25 years ago, this took an early arrival by the teacher. It also took setting up chairs in a particular manner, and a plan to move during the session. And to do that, the lesson had to be thoroughly planned and prepared. This meant the teacher would be able to walk around without having to look at the textbook or teaching materials very much during class.
Tips for Effective Online Classroom Management
Online, advanced planning is even more critical, because the course elements need to be placed into the online classroom so that everything is available to learners when they need it. Much of the time the entire course must be ready before the semester even starts.
Some of this advanced planning could take the form of a screencast walkthrough, to help your students know where to find things, and example assignments to illustrate formatting. Perhaps an example assignment might also illustrate the approximate length, or the depth that a student should explore, and grading approaches that you will use.
Another advanced planning element might include a thoughtful course announcement leading into each week. Maybe you want to provide a netiquette guide that tells students how to communicate with each other, and with their instructor throughout the class. A netiquette guide can help a lot, especially for students new to online learning who just don’t know yet that communicating in a discussion space really is different from text messaging. This is a great way to help your students know how to communicate in the online space and comfortably make connections with you and other class members throughout the experience.
Effective classroom management is probably one of the most important responsibilities we educators face in any number of learning environments, whether you’re live or online. Classroom management may be defined as the act of supervising relationships, behaviors, and instructional settings and lessons for communities of learners.
And classroom management really is a preventative activity that results in decreased discipline problems. Basically, preventative management means that many classroom problems can be solved through good planning, interesting and relevant lessons, and effective teaching.
Now when you plan ahead for what you’ll teach and how you’ll teach it, and when you will learn what your students will find most valuable and relevant, you can give your students what they really need. They need relevant, prepared lessons. And they need to learn in ways that support their goals for advancing in their professional career areas, and in their personal development.
And of course, they need connections with you, and with each other, to feel like they belong and stay connected when online education might otherwise become an isolating experience.
How Can Online Educators Help Students with Time Management?
Now let’s move into our third area, online students’ challenges: time management. Online students have challenges with time management and juggling the balance between studying and their work commitments. What does this mean for you as an online educator?
Well first, communicating what to expect from the very first day of class can help your students to plan ahead. In a previous part time faculty position I held online several years ago, I provided students with a sample schedule each week on which I suggested which tasks to complete in the online course every day.
These included suggestions like reading the textbook assignment on Monday, posting in the discussion on Tuesday and taking the first quiz. On Wednesday beginning a draft of their assignment, completing another piece of the curriculum on Thursday, and responding to classmates and their instructor in the discussion on Fridays and Saturdays.
In this way, they would be touching a few pieces of the class every day during the week. This would keep the workloads small every day, and actually give them a lot more reinforcement in their learning, spreading the work out. While not everyone will need this, or use this suggested schedule, providing that kind of help can really assist online students to see what the workload is like. Then they can plan how to manage it.
Second, providing some flexibility when students need it is also helpful with time management challenges. Flexibility does not mean that you go easy on the rigor of the course, or that you’re less accurate with your grading.
Why It’s Important to Show Students that You Care About their Learning
And of course, students need to feel that their instructor really cares that they learn. In a study of 609 online learners, caring was the number one predictor of online instructor ratings. “It turns out that caring is very important, even for adult learners.”
Thinking about what students need in order to be successful in their online experience helps you to get on their side of the challenge. Our students want to feel seen, known, and loved in their learning. And when we give them the tools and strategies that help them along, they experienced a great partnership with us.
It’s also helpful to check in with our students to see how they’re doing throughout the class, and to ask where they could use the most support and guidance. In a survey of online learners in 2020, 63% of students surveyed said that they had problems with time management, and 59% of the students cited that they had jobs that were conflicting and that work commitments were a challenge. “Allowing for flexibility while maintaining the right level of accountability at the program and course level is essential for students to be successful” (Wiley, 2020).
Learn about What Motivates Your Students
Students have a variety of specific objectives, needs, and challenges when they take courses online. We can see their objectives by asking them what they hope to achieve by completing our class. And we know that generally online students start off with the goal of professional advancement, and then they are sustained throughout their learning by continuing personal growth.
Remembering these two motivators can help us assume the best of intentions when we struggle to understand what’s going on with one of our students, or when we think about what would be most helpful in teaching them. With clear objectives, our students need us to plan. They need us to plan ahead and to practice is a high level of classroom management.
Classroom management online is a preventative approach to preparing the classroom itself, and keeping students informed about what to expect every step of the way. Classroom management also means that we build relationships with our students and help them learn how to engage with each other and with us during their experience.
And while we focus on meeting online students’ needs, it’s helpful to remember that the specific challenges they face, like time management and professional work commitments. Knowing about their challenges just might prompt us to reach out when we see students drop off in their engagement, and to be somewhat flexible when students hit unexpected time management snags.
Closing out the podcast this week, I encourage you to get to know your online students better. Learn about what motivates them to take your class, and learn about what their objectives really are. Explore what they need in order to hit their goals. Is there something more you can do in the way you prepare for the next week that will make it even clearer how your students can satisfy their own objectives during the class?
And find out how you might gain additional insight into their challenges. What do they struggle with most in your online course? What is challenging about studying online? What challenges might prevent them from completing the course, but which could be reduced if you were to try a particular strategy, or a particular approach? Once you see your students’ objectives, needs, and challenges, what might you try or do in your online teaching this coming week?
Thank you for joining me today for the Online Teaching Lounge podcast. We’ve taken a look at the objectives needs and challenges of online students, generally, and how we can help them. I hope you will try one new approach this week to help keep your teaching fresh, and help you see your students even more clearly. Best wishes to you in your online teaching this coming week.
This is Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge Podcast. To share comments and requests for future episodes, please visit Bethaniehansen.com/request. Best wishes this coming week in your online teaching journey.
by Dr. Bethanie Hansen | Energy, Higher Education, Podcast, Stress, Students, Teaching Online
This content originally appeared at APUEdge.Com.
The holidays can be a difficult time for everyone, but especially for online students whose coursework continues over the holiday break. In this episode, Dr. Bethanie Hansen offers suggestions for how online educators can incorporate flexibility and sensitivity into course design to accommodate students who may be struggling. Also learn about scaffolding assignments and other accommodations to help students succeed during the holidays.
Read the Transcript:
Dr. Bethanie Hansen: This podcast is for educators, academics and parents who know that online teaching can be challenging, but it can also be rewarding, engaging, and fun. Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hanson. And I’ll be your guide for online teaching tips, topics and strategies. Walk with me into the Online Teaching Lounge.
At the time of this recording, it is December 2020, and we are in the midst of a pandemic. Online students everywhere are preparing for the holidays, which might include a break from online classes, or it might not. If you’re at an institution like mine, you have classes that overlap the holidays. So students will still be working and learning and submitting assignments throughout those holiday breaks that others might take for granted.
Today, we’re going to talk about how to prepare students for the holiday break or the holidays working through assignments, either way, in three ways. The first one is through some flexibility and sensitivity to your students’ needs. The second will be scaffolding assignments and other interactive activities. And the last one will be special considerations in three areas of physiology, focus and connection. So let’s jump in.
Why should we think about preparing our online students for the holidays? This year, the year that this was recorded, there are some special considerations around the holidays. Now, we all believe that the holidays are a time of celebration, a time to connect with others, as well as a time of loss for some people who have been significantly impacted at this time of year. For whom those memories and experiences come back again and again.
Regardless of what your students are experiencing right now, the whole world is in a tense and stressful situation with COVID-19 and this pandemic adds a lot to what is going on. Online coursework can be challenging anyway, because there is a lesser degree of connection. However, your students are in good hands with you at the helm, because you will be able to be flexible and sensitive, scaffold the work, and also help them in three special ways.
Build Sensitivity and Flexibility into Classroom Communication
The first area of flexibility and sensitivity is an important one when working with adult learners online and with a variety of other groups. Knowing that for some, the holidays are a time of celebration, while for others, it’s a time of loneliness and loss, you can exercise a lot of sensitivity in working with your students.
You might consider asking them what they are thinking about for the upcoming holidays. Maybe ask them if they are going to be able to be at home. If they will have a chance to connect with others. If they have anything planned that they would like to share, and so forth.
There are a lot of reasons why students will reach out to you about the holidays. And some of those might include just sharing what they’re experiencing. I know I’ve had online students occasionally reach out to me to let me know so that they are having a struggle. They’re not able to get through the work as usual at that time of year. Maybe things slow down for them and they’re a little depressed.
Some of them have so much going on with family and friends, that they’re also torn between their school commitments and their other connections. And they have to figure out a way to balance that.
Either way, sensitivity can be in the way we communicate with our students, either through our videos or our typed messages to them, the frequency of our communication and the word choice that we use. Consider a variety of circumstances your students might be facing as you communicate about the upcoming holidays with them.
Secondarily to that is the flexibility. Some students will just need a little bit of extra time. They might need another day or two. Other students might need an entire week to submit an assignment under these kinds of circumstances.
Some colleagues and I were speaking together the other day, and we were talking about how maybe COVID-19 hasn’t impacted one or more of our homes specifically, but the stress of the ongoing pandemic adds a lot to our emotional palette anyway.
Consider this as your students are struggling through this time of year. They might also be dealing with seasonal issues, inclement weather, cloudy skies. A lot of things can pile up to create an emotional climate that makes it very difficult for them to work as usual.
Flexibility might include giving a little extra time, choosing not to deduct late points or late deductions you might normally include, and other kinds of accommodations that might work for your students and sound reasonable to you.
Although, it might be difficult to be in tune with students’ emotions when you’re working online, we have had occasions where faculty members experienced students in distress. A student might actually tell you that they are not feeling up to doing anything, that they are feeling depressed, or maybe even that they are feeling suicidal.
If those kinds of things come up as you’re teaching your online class, be sure to reach out to the appropriate services at your institution to support them, the suicide hotline or the local police, if that is appropriate. Follow through on those things students say and take them seriously.
Scaffolding Assignments for the Holidays
A second area I want to talk about is scaffolding the assignments up to the holiday period. As a holiday is approaching, some faculty members just extend an assignment a few days, or maybe even an entire week. When you do this, students feel that they have the appropriate time to complete the work.
This might require adjusting the class before the course even begins to make sure your syllabus lines up with the calendar. If you haven’t done that, you could simply move the due date out and post announcements and reminders to let everyone know you’re giving them a few extra days.
One word of warning there, students do not appreciate the extra time, when they have already submitted the work. So it’s very helpful to tell students upfront, to give them a little bit of notice when you’re going to extend a timeline and also to help them understand when things are due and what is included in that assignment.
To scaffold assignments up to the holiday period, you might consider giving them some kind of advanced organizer to help them think through the work that is coming up. As I mentioned with the added stress of the pandemic and the holidays combined, many people find it difficult to perform up to their normal level of standard for themselves, and also find it difficult to think clearly as they would like to do.
When you scaffold an assignment, what you’re doing is giving a preparation to help people think. Maybe you’re taking the big assignment and you’re breaking it down into some smaller pieces, so that they’re a little easier to complete. And then they can be combined together, to submit as that final assignment.
For example, if a student is writing an essay, you might give an advanced organizer like a brainstorming chart, so they could break down the topic, solicit their sources, explore options, and even give you an outline ahead of time to have it briefly checked and given some feedback.
Scaffolding assignments really is twofold. The first is to break it down into smaller chunks that are easier to do. But the second is also to have easier pieces building up to the more complex parts, so that students can think through each step clearly, and then have a pleasing whole at the end.
Encourage Physical Activity
The last area I want to share today when you’re preparing students for the holidays, is considerations that are in the physical or physiology area, focus, and connection.
In the physiology area, it’s helpful to make suggestions for your students and for yourself to get up and change locations regularly. The more we stand up, take a little walk, stretch, even get some exercise, that will really help us to be focused. To be able to be on target when we’re doing our online work. And also to be able to endure the long stretches of work time that we tend to be under, either as the faculty member or as the online student.
Many people sit in the chair in front of that computer and they might go for hours without a break. This is going to slow circulation. It’s going to lower the mood and the overall effect and make it easier to feel sluggish, less clear thinking as well.
The more we make suggestions for small physical movement or encourage people to get up and just stretch and walk around, the more we help them to shake off that stuck state that they might be in, being in front of the computer. And it’s a great suggestion to offer your students as well.
I myself have a treadmill desk. If I need to be in a meeting where I don’t have to be on video, I can set my computer on the treadmill and I can take a walk while I’m in the meeting. Your students might be able to do the same thing.
Many of them are online students right now and also working online. So there’s a lot of sitting around that can add to a deflated mood and more sluggish thinking, as well as lower circulation. So suggesting physiological changes will help everyone to be able to get through the holidays with a little bit more energy and a method to interrupt stuck thinking.
The focus area of this triad of the physiology, focus and connection piece, is about what people are thinking about. Our students might be thinking ahead to when the course is over and they’re going to need to celebrate the holidays. Or maybe they’re going to not be with their family; maybe they are going to be with their family.
Students are already starting to project forward to the holidays themselves, even though they might be in the middle of a class with you. As they’re doing that, a lot of added stress can come with that, especially if their plans have changed because they’re not able to travel or they’re not able to connect with the people they love.
If you find that’s the case with your students, you might help them to focus on the present, what they can do to stay present in their course. And also to think about those things that they do have and those times that they have been able to connect with others, to foster a sense of gratitude.
This brings the idea of abundance, instead of the focus on what we’re lacking, and it can help generate creativity, innovation, ideas, and the sense of being present to complete the work they needed to do. To keep learning and to also do well at their studies.
Lastly, the connection piece. I was at a virtual party the other day, I wasn’t really sure would be like a party. And I was surprised at the degree of planning that went into this virtual event. And I was also surprised at the great connections that happened at this online party.
There are a lot of ways for us to connect with other humans, other people, whether it’s our family, friends, or our fellow students, or our classmates. We really want to connect with other people around the holidays, but it can be very difficult when people are physically separated or largely just know each other in the online environment.
One of the suggestions I’d like to make for connecting during the holidays when people are working online and being online students is to use a video platform, to plan ahead for the day and time, to even create an agenda and consider including some interactive technologies.
The party that I attended had a spinning wheel where some prizes were given out that were virtual gift cards that were delivered by email. Each person’s name was put on the spinning wheel. And they were able to spin it online during the party and then it would stop on its own and a person would win here and there.
There was also the opportunity to share ideas through the Mentimeter platform. That’s a really great way to vote, to collaborate on ideas, to create word clouds. This might even be a good tool to integrate in your online teaching generally. But if you decide to have some kind of a live gathering, it’s especially useful.
So you can suggest connecting with each other, but you could also have a class gathering. A holiday gathering of some sort using virtual means with your students might be just the ticket to wrap up the semester nicely and also wish them well as they wrap up the year that has passed.
Your Take-Aways
Consider these ideas, the flexibility and sensitivity, the scaffolding the assignments, and also the physiological, the focus and the connection pieces that students are going to need as they wrap up the year and whether they are taking a break or not, as they wrap up this month as well.
Lastly, I’d like to encourage you as the online educator. There’s a great podcast that was done, where I interviewed Dr. Lisset Pickens, and she shared some great ideas for balancing your work and home life.
If that’s an area you’d like to work on in the month ahead, definitely check it out. Some great suggestions in there about shutting off the work-life and turning on the home life at the end of the workday were made. And those suggestions are incredibly valuable.
I’d like to also suggest doing the things that you love, that go with holidays. For example, if you’re a person that likes to decorate at the office, decorate the classroom, and if you’re working from home right now, go ahead and decorate that space you’re working in. Go ahead and wear your holiday sweater or your holiday blouse, that you might have worn to the office or the classroom.
Taking those little extra steps to celebrate what’s important to you is going to add energy to what you’re doing. And it’s also going to give you a sense of normalcy in a very difficult time. Thank you for being here and I wish you all the best in your online teaching this week. And happy holidays!
This is Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge podcast. To share comments and requests for future episodes, please visit bethaniehansen.com/request. Best wishes this coming week in your online teaching journey.
by Dr. Bethanie Hansen | Best practices, Higher Education, Leadership, Podcast, Students, Teaching Online
This content originally appeared on Online Learning Tips.
Subscribe to Online Teaching Lounge
Read the Transcript:
Dr. Bethanie Hansen: This is Episode Number 33, Andragogy in Online Education. This podcast is for educators, academics and parents who know that online teaching can be challenging, but it can also be rewarding, engaging, and fun.
Welcome to the Online Teaching Lounge. I’m your host, Dr. Bethanie Hansen. And I’ll be your guide for online teaching tips, topics and strategies. Walk with me into the Online Teaching Lounge.
Welcome to the podcast today. Thank you for joining me for this conversation about andragogy in online education. I attended the Online Learning Consortium’s Accelerate 2020 Conference, and there was a session the very first morning that really piqued my interest.
What is Andragogy?
As an online professional for the past 10 years, I’ve already studied andragogy quite a bit. If you’ve never heard of this term, you might be wondering, “What is andragogy?” This presentation was given by a team from Excelsior College. The title of their presentation was: “Andragogy as a Guide for Serving Adults in the Online Environment.” The presenters were Malcolm Oliver, the Associate Dean; Anna Zendell, Faculty Program Director; Gretchen Schmidt, Faculty Program Director; Candice Ward, Faculty Program Director; Michele Paludi, a Senior Faculty Program Director; Amelia Estwick, National Cybersecurity Institute Director; and then Kevin Moore from the Cybersecurity Department as well. This was a wonderful group of folks. They shared their thoughts about creating assignments in a master’s degree program that were much more relevant for andragogy.
If you think about the word “pedagogy,” this is about the idea or theory of how we teach young people ages 24 and under. Children go through preschool, elementary school, junior high, high school. Before they go through college, they are taught in methods that we might refer to as pedagogy. These are the styles of how we teach, the methods of how we teach, the strategies.
Once we reach age 25 onward, we think of adult learners from the perspective of using andragogy. Andragogy is an approach to the adult learner that is quite different from pedagogy and I’ll cover those differences in this podcast today. I’ll also address why we should care about andragogy, how it helps our students, how it helps us. And then some ideas to apply it; some from the presentation I attended and also some from my own experience.
Why Adult Learners Like Online Education
Now, first of all, I’d like to just tell you a little bit more about adult learners. Those would be the folks from ages 25 onward. Individuals, 25 years old and onward enrolled in higher education, these are the people in the “adult learner” category. I, myself have occasionally run into students as old as 75, 85 years old in my online classes. We could really have a range of people in our courses from 25 years old onward, anywhere in that range of the rest of life.
Now, there was a survey conducted in 2016 that determined the mean age of online undergrad students was 29 years old. That’s a downward trend, it used to be around the age of 34. In American Public University, where I tend to teach my courses, we have an average student age of around 33, but, of course, as I mentioned, that varies, and we do have students in the upper end of that range.
Now, even though there’s a trend toward younger students online and during the pandemic, we certainly have a lot of the typical college student age of 18 to 25 who have moved online, maybe not even by choice. However, even though there’s a trend, the majority of people who enroll in online programs are typically adult learners.
The reason for this is that they work full-time or they work part-time. They have established lifestyles, they might be married with children. Perhaps they don’t even live near a college campus, and online learning is the only way they could pursue this additional education.
One of the reasons adult learners like online education is that it is flexible. It’s a great way for them to get their college education without quitting the full-time job, and while raising their children. I, myself completed one of my degrees entirely online with a residency near the end of the program. And I could not have done that had I had to attend the classes in a live setting.
I’m an advocate for online education. I think it’s a great thing for a lot of people. And it’s also adaptable, flexible, and can meet people wherever they’re at. Online courses are accessible and programs widely available when they’re put online. And this helps adult learners pursue these goals they might otherwise not be able to reach.
Now, adult learners really are a unique population. It would not be appropriate to approach them with pedagogy or those emphases that we give to the 18-to-25 year old population. In many cases, we’re teaching that group how to be academics, how to show up on time, how to format things.
But the real emphasis with adult learners is on self-direction. Helping them to know the “why” behind what they’re doing. This is going to help them be autonomous.
Most of our adult learners are mature, practical, confident, self-directed, and they’re not as open-minded or receptive to change. So they really do need some background and college work that’s going to be relevant to what they’re going to do when they’re finished.
How Adult Learners Differ from Younger Learners
They have specific needs that the younger students might not share. For example, adult learners need to be emotionally connected to their learning so they can remember it and find value in it. They also need to see how it’s going to be relevant to their current situation right now and how it’s going to help them in the future when they’re done with their degree.
Now, when you give adult learners emotional experiences and connections to the content, they’re going to really persevere throughout the course. They’re going to understand the content better, and remember it. Because they have special characteristics, they generally need to be in control of their own learning, but they also need us to give them structure and support right upfront so they can launch into the task.
Above everything else we like applied learning and relevance. These are both very important.
The theory of andragogy was initially emphasized by a researcher, Malcolm Knowles, and this theory applies to online education broadly. And it’s also useful to focus on for Master’s degree programs, which is what this team from Excelsior College was presenting about.
Now, I’m going to share with you some of the ideas that came from this session I attended. They shared some great ideas for adjustments that could be made to typical assignments and applications for those assignments in their master’s degree courses. One of the things I really loved about this team’s presentation is that they shared the difference between pedagogy and andragogy.
Just to highlight, I’ve already explained to you what andragogy is: Self-directed, self-oriented, problem-centered and internally motivated. But I haven’t said much about what pedagogy is. This is more teacher-led and teacher-oriented. We assume that the young learners are fully dependent on their teacher. It’s more centered on the subject matter to be mastered and not the person themselves, and it’s often externally motivated.
Grades are a really big deal to younger students and may not always be for older students. We do see that a lot of people are returning to their education right now. Some of them have stopped working. Maybe they were not able to continue working due to the pandemic. For whatever reason, we do have a large influx of online students just about everywhere right now, and we want to be able to serve them the best we can.
Why Should We Care about Andragogy?
So why should we care about andragogy and not approach things from a pedagogy approach? Well, for one thing, it helps our learners and it meets them where they are and it gives them what they need much more specifically.
We suffer a lot when we control and dominate the instruction. And when we take a step back and treat them the way andragogy suggests, we are going to have a much better experience as the instructor. Furthermore, our students are going to feel empowered to learn. They want to be able to guide around the subject matter and tie it to their own experience.
4 Principles of Andragogy
Now, there are four principles of andragogy that the team shared in their presentation, and I’m going to share them with you now.
- First, adult learners are involved. They need to be involved in the planning and the evaluation of what they’re learning.
- Secondly, adult learners’ experiences need to be connected to the learning activities. In other words, they need to be able to tie their life experiences to their learning as they’re learning things. If you were to teach someone and tell them not to share their experience or opinion as part of an assignment or experience, that would make it more difficult. It’s necessary and essential.
- Third, relevance and impact to the learners’ lives. Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance and impact to their job or personal life. As I mentioned, it needs to be connected.
- And lastly, problem-centered. Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented.
As we think about these four principles, the team whose presentation I’m sharing with you today talked about how they applied those four principles in their assignments.
Meeting Learning Goals by Getting Learners Involved
For the first assumption, this team shared that they were focused on helping the students establish their own learning goals within the course objectives. The curriculum was focused on the learning process, much more than it was focused on the content itself.
One of the ways that this is possible is when the instructor is helping learners to actually come at it as equal partners. And the instructor is coming in as a subject matter expert to help them, to mentor them, to give them expertise, and definitely to give them wings to fly.
Safety, psychological safety is pretty important. The students need to be able to share their ideas openly without being afraid and connect to their experiences when they’re in the class in front of others.
Some of the things that were suggested by this team, these are some of the great ideas I came away with, were collaborative content creation. Students can actually curate some of the content that comes into the course to be studied. They can also choose projects that matter to them personally.
In giving choice for the assignments, you can use decision trees where they might go down one path and choose this type of assignment or another path and choose a different type. There’s a lot of options in helping students to be self-directed, especially if you’re able to connect the work that they’re doing to industries where the subject matter actually is relevant or would be used.
Help Adults Bring Life Experiences Into the Classroom
For the second assumption that adults bring life experience to the learning environment. Some of the things that the team suggested were to find ways to help students share their personal experiences and knowledge in the course. Help them express their opinions, share their ideas and openly discuss all sides of issues. The more we can give our students the application and the space to apply, the more we’re going to see really great outcomes in their learning.
Now, here are a few more examples of the types of assignments that could be used, especially in a Master’s degree program, but pretty much broadly with adult learners. And those examples that the presenters shared were case analysis, internships, debates, virtual research symposium, national case competitions, organizational consultants to a fictional company, and student organizations.
Now, the more you can bring those experiences into that online classroom, the better it’s going to get. Some of the communications that could leverage real technologies are actually tweets, press releases and videos, journal articles that students are going to create for a fictional journal. There could be some professional projects that would apply in the workplace. And also, we can talk about how students would present to different teams in business settings.
Give Adult Learners Clear Direction to See Relevance and Make Connections
The third assumption that the adult learner really does come to online education ready to go, ready to learn. The truth is they want to learn because they’re going to get something out of this experience. They’re either going to personally grow or develop professionally in a way that will further them in their employment or enhance their position in some way. Maybe they’ll make a rank advancement in the military or be able to promote internally in an organization.
Either way, these learners are ready to learn and eager to do what we ask of them. The best ways to help them are to give them clear steps to get started in the assignment, clear applications, and to break the goals down into smaller things, so they’re more accessible.
It’s possible that we have students that really do need some extra help. And it’s great if we can predict that upfront, let them know what the format is for an assignment and what all the expectations are.
Help Adult Learners See the Real-World Application of Lessons
Lastly, we have adult learners are problem-oriented. And that means that we want to really focus on the process for completing the assignment. During the process of learning or doing the work, your students are going to grow in some way and create content that has to do with what they need out of the course. Whatever reason they’re there, how they’re going to connect it to their professional arena, or maybe apply it in everyday life. Whatever kind of assignments you use that are problem-oriented, these things are going to really help students see the application of ideas.
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I was a younger person, some of the subjects I had to learn in school did not have a clear, direct application. I could think of a math class or two. The concepts really did apply, but I did not have teachers that showed me how they applied to real life very often, and I definitely resisted story problems.
If we have concepts that might be on the abstract end of things, the more we can give examples or help them do the work in a way that walks them through the steps of the process to really do something in reality and not just talk about it, that’s going to help learners get a lot more out of the experience.
Create a Mock Journal Assignment
Overall, in the program that was shared from these presenters at Excelsior, there were a lot of great assignment examples such as the case study. But one of the things that really impressed me was that they went through and systematically selected assignments that really did simulate the real-life experience if they weren’t able to actually go to the real-life experience.
And the one that I mentioned earlier that I just want to return to now is this idea of a mock journal. If people write professionally, in a trade, in a field, or academically in adulthood, we have professional journals in pretty much every field that there is.
They created a mock journal where students would practice proposing to the journal and then write for it. What a wonderful way to get them ready for real presentations, real writing experiences, and really go through the steps needed so they’re ready to go for the future.
In closing, these ideas shared about andragogy, how adult learners are essentially different than our typical college-age population of the 18 to 25 year old group, understanding that, we can reach them where they are. We can meet their needs much better, and we can be a lot more creative about the kinds of work that we guide them through so that they walk away with things that are relevant and can apply to their real life and their professional endeavors. They can learn it and use it immediately and keep using it in the future.
Again, thank you for joining me for this recap of a session at the OLC Conference 2020 the discussion about andragogy and assignments that would be helpful in meeting students where they are.
Additional Resources for Teaching Adult Learners
There are a few previous episodes of the Online Teaching Lounge I’d like to recommend in this idea of reaching learners where they’re at and meeting their needs. And the first one is Episode 25 back in September of this year, 2020. That episode is about influence to build community, which can also really help you in meeting the needs of adult students, adult learners.
Another one for yourself as a faculty member is Episode 27, Connecting with a Faculty Peer Community When You Work Online. Not only do our students need connection, application and relevance, but so do we as educators. And the more we teach online, the more important that is.
Thank you again for being here. I wish you all the best in your online teaching this coming week.
This is Dr. Bethanie Hansen, your host for the Online Teaching Lounge podcast. To share comments and requests for future episodes please visit bethaniehansen.com/request. Best wishes this coming week in your online teaching journey.
References:
Hansen, B. L. (2019). Teaching Music Appreciation Online. Oxford University Press.
Knowles, M. S. (1990). The adult learners: A neglected species. Houstan: Gulf Publishing Co.
