Hindsight is 2020

Here we stand, about five months into the COVID-19 global pandemic, and we already have an opportunity to look back and see what we can learn to improve the future. The specific future that I am referring to is the Fall 2020 semester. As of right now, I am not sure if colleges and universities will be 100% online, as was the case after spring break 2020, but I would bet that a sizable number of courses will either be offered completely online or at least include some form of an online component (Chronicle Staff 2020). Therefore, it would behoove us to reflect on how we can improve the online experience we were required to rapidly develop and deliver to our students in Spring 2020, so that, ultimately, we can prepare our courses, ourselves, and our students for a better future – no matter what form of instruction we find ourselves needing to deliver in Fall 2020.

As the Spring 2020 semester was wrapping up, I was involved in a couple of Zoom meetings, the combination of which gave me pause. In the first Zoom meeting, a long-time professor was discussing how faculty members in his department were feeling pretty good about how they were able to successfully put the contents of their courses online in such a short period of time. In the second Zoom meeting, just a day later, I was listening to some students who were asked to share about how the transition to online learning went for them. The students first shared some positive features of their online learning experience, such as the opportunity to review recorded Zoom lectures; the convenience of online office hours; the helpfulness of weekly checklists sent out by their instructors; and the use, by some faculty, of breakout groups in Zoom. However, the students went on to also share a number of serious concerns with their experience, including feeling extremely disconnected from the instructor and other students in the class; feeling demotivated to attend or study for classes; having a few classes where only the PowerPoint slides were posted, but no further explanations or voice over lectures were provided; and lacking the technology needed in their new location to be successful. While pondering the juxtaposition between the faculty voice in the first Zoom meeting and the student voices in the second Zoom meeting, it dawned on me – putting content online is one thing, learning from that content is quite another. With only a moment's notice to transition their courses from face-to-face to online, faculty members, especially those who had never taught online before, were only thinking about one thing – how can I put my course content online? I can completely understand that frame of mind (Schmidt, 2020a). However, now that we have time to reflect, at least a little, it seems intuitive that we need to include in our newly created online courses much more than content – as espoused by Cheelan BoLinn, from the Center of Innovations in Teaching and Learning on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus, “Content is essential, but not sufficient.”

Just as with face-to-face courses, there are numerous best, go-to practices to include in our online courses (for example see Major, 2015 and Darby, 2020). Since it is not possible (or desirable) to try and cover all of these in one editorial, what I would like to do is focus on three practices (some of which I have discussed in previous editorials as applied to face-to-face course delivery) that we can implement to help our students learn online. There are, of course, many, many more than three useful practices, but I was hoping to get us off to a good start with these three.

As I wrap-up this editorial, I would like to share one last overall thought about the significance of making student-content connections that I recently ran across in a blog post6 by Watanabe-Crockett (2019), which transcends the mode used in delivering our content. A few paragraphs into the blog post, the author makes the following statement: “It's absolutely impossible for our students to learn without experiencing connections to the concepts we teach them. We can achieve this through providing both context and relevance. Without connection there is no interest, and interest always precedes meaningful and authentic learning. So it's essential that we are making strong learning connections to help them develop the thinking habits they need to succeed.” I agree wholeheartedly with the author that meaningful and authentic learning is not possible without making relevant and personal connections. Sure, our students can remember the material long enough to pass, or maybe even score an A, on an exam; but learning that lasts a lifetime comes because of connections – relevant, useful, and personal connections.

In the next section of the blog post, Watanabe-Crockett (2019) does something really interesting, he adds awareness and connection to the base of Bloom's Taxonomy and labels them as Teaching (Figure 2), whereas the six elements of Bloom's Taxonomy (remembering to creating) are labeled as Learning. Watanabe-Crockett contends that we must start with awareness because we can't conceive of or recall anything that we are not aware of. Though this sounds quite obvious, we need to consider how crucial awareness is to our students’ learning and purposefully draw them into the content with our engaging teaching practices, which at the same time pulls them away from distractions. After awareness, the next job of the instructor is to help students make strong connections to the content. Once fostered, these connections ready our students to do their job – learning.