Question 1: From your experience during the Spring semester, what approaches to online learning taken by students seemed to be most successful for them?
I want to preface my answer my saying that both my Spring courses were team-oriented, project-intensive courses. We had a great advantage in that the teams were formed before the pandemic forced campus to close. I am planning to do less team work than I normally would since it is so hard to mentor distributed teams as they learn fundamental technical and social processes of collaboration.
A common feature of my most successful student teams was that they maintained a regular schedule. They all had this before the pandemic, and many of them carried that schedule forward as classes moved to purely online. They established regular meeting times, generally between three and six hours, during which times all team members were expected to be online and working on the project. Some used Zoom audio or video meetings during the whole time, while others used Discord or Slack, switching to Zoom audio or video calling when text was inadequate. Because the whole team was online at the same time, teams were able to clear up communication quickly, before issues festered and became social and technical problems.
The most successful teams combined synchronous distributed meetings with asynchronous, persistent chatrooms—either Slack or Discord. This gave a place where they could pose questions, provide links, encourage each other, and otherwise socialize outside of their scheduled meeting times. In the cases where I was invited to join and participate in these discussions, I definitely saw the best students doing all four of those things. The impact of peer-encouragement on these forums is not to be underestimated. When students took the time to give each other a little virtual pat on the back, it clearly and directly contributed to a higher morale, better learning, and increased productivity.
Students and teams who reached out to me for help had much better results than those who didn't. This should come as no surprise, as it's the same for in-person classes, but it also should not be discounted. I could answer easy questions over email, and anything more involved could be done through a video chat—ideally with the whole team. In a normal semester, I would set up face-to-face meetings for this purpose, but video chat actually proved much easier, and I plan to keep this tool on my toolbelt moving forward, regardless of instructional mode.
Question 2: Conversely, were there certain approaches to online learning on the part of students that caused them difficulty or led to unsuccessful outcomes?
After campus shut down, a few of my student teams decided to take this as an opportunity to relax their schedules. Rather than meet together to work on the project at specific times, they divvied out responsibilities and asked people to work whenever they felt like it. This led to the unfortunate but seemingly-inevitable consequences of miscommunication and confusion, which then resulted in mistrust and poor performance. Briefly, every team that relaxed their schedule of meetings regretted it.
Incidentally, if you ask any undergraduate what the worst part of college is, the answer is "group projects." There are many reasons for this, and they include that we don't do well, institutionally, at teaching students how to work in groups. I had an upper-division class in Fall 2019 in which we had a powerful heart-to-heart conversation in which the room of students admitted they had never been on anything than a dysfunctional team in any school experience. That is, working on a team is not just intrinsically hard: the students also have no tacit or mental model for what positive collaboration looks like.
Coming back to the question, another problem I saw was students' using familiar tools rather than effective but novel tools. Discord vs. Zoom is a great example. Many students use Discord for online gaming, and since they are familiar with the tool, it becomes a natural choice for them when deciding on how to work together as a team. Discord even recently added screen-sharing, so that you can see what a teammate is working on. However, this is like streaming on Twitch: it's a one-way stream, in which one person is working and others are watching. Contrast this against Zoom's Screen Sharing feature, in which anyone on the team can actually drive the host's computer. This leads to real collaboration rather than simply passive or voyeuristic participation. In almost every online team meeting in the Spring, a case would come up where someone in the conversation (often me!) would take control of the screen and type in a few characters to explain a concept, or steer the mouse to demonstrate an interaction. This gives a similar affordance to sitting together in the lab or in office hours, temporarily "taking the wheel" to demonstrate something, as compared to the passive-consumptive stream approach, which as no affordance for collaborative work.
An important point about this is that some of my teams continued to use Discord even after I pointed out the problem or, in one case, mandated the use of something else. The team's inertia and pride kept them from learning about a better solution to their problem. I suppose what we see here is that the root cause is not the tool but the pride, but that seems to be always how it is.
Question 3: What are some tips you can offer students about how they can make the most of online learning and have the most successful outcomes?
Students are in many ways at the mercy of their instructors. The frustrating truth is that it can be hard to get faculty to make the most of learning toward the goal of successful outcomes. Because of this, students need to be careful consumers. To the extent possible, see what you can find out about the courses you want to take. See if you can infer from the designs that this is going to be good learning experience, based on the objectives of the course and the interactions designed for them. Personally, I keep all my course plans public and online, but I suspect I'm in the small minority there.
Advice that is easy to give and hard to swallow is be conscientious. Conscientiousness is highly correlated with academic success, and no matter how conscientious you are, you can always take action to improve. I think the most accessible way to do this is to set up a schedule for a week, see how well you can follow it, and then actively reflect on the differences between what you had hoped to do and what you did do. Nobody is going to make you do this reflection, but that is where the real learning happens.
It's also important to keep in mind a few core principles of effective learning, such as I wrote about in my notes about the excellent Make It Stick. These principles are not about success in college so much as how to become an effective lifetime learner. Ideally, these things would align, but in practice, they don't always do so. I'll repeat my quotation here from Chapter 8 of that book, which provides a great overview of the mindset of effective learning.
- Some kinds of difficulties during learning help to make the learning stronger and better remembered.
- When learning is easy, it is often superficial and soon forgotten.
- Note all of our intellectual abilities are hardwired. In fact, when learning is effortful, it changes the brain, making new connections and increasing intellectual ability.
- You learn better when you wrestle with new problems before being shown the solution, rather than the other way around.
- To achieve excellence in any sphere, you must strive to surpass your current level of ability.
- Striving, by its nature, often results in setbacks, and setbacks are often what provide essential information needed to adjust strategies to achieve mastery.
Finally, my advice to all learners is practice intellectual humility. Listen to other people as if they know something you don't know, because they do.
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