Although it may sound simple, transferring a traditional classroom-based course into an online environment requires some adaptation. In this topic we have talked a lot about the reasons why students drop out from online courses. Lee and Choi (2011) listed factors they found influencing student retention at online courses, and grouped them in student-related factors, course-related factors and environment-related factors. The teachers can clearly affect most of the course-related factors by successful adaptation of the course for online use.
A good example of a successful course organization in an online environment was given by Gilly Salmon, and is called the five stage model for online courses (https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html). The five stages include:
- Access and Motivation
- Online socialization
- Information exchange
- Knowledge construction
- Development
I found particularly interesting the importance of online socialization. We as educators do not often think much about this topic, and socialization is expected to happen spontaneously (or not) as the course goes on. However, importance of online socialization is becoming more recognized even in classroom-based education. As an example, one master program at a Swedish university has included a retreat for 2 days for all students at the very beginning of the program. This serves the students to get to know each other and connect in an informal environment. Why is this important? Well, these students will in the following two years see each other nearly every day, they will have to work together on multiple group assignments. As in every team, for all these tasks to work better, it is of great help if participants know and trust each other. They would feel more dedicated and more responsible towards the team and would feel more emphatic and willing to help out and share the workload. Going to a retreat may sound too expensive, but cheaper variants can be found, such as simple going for drinks, or many smaller team building activities.
Given the importance of human contact, transferring socialization to online environment sounds challenging. It is much more difficult to make the group of people well connected and to feel as team if they do not have a chance to meet. In the beginning of our ONL course we have all met in a videoconference, and said a few words about ourselves. Next, we had to post about ourselves in the created Google+ group. Then, our first task was also to make a group presentation of our whole group, where each participant posted something about him/herself. In some online courses such as MOOCs, an informal forum threads are open for people to chat. However, in such a huge community as in MOOCs it is hard for people to connect on individual level.
In smaller groups of people connecting online such as our group in ONL (of 8 participants) it is easier to connect during regular meetings. Since the very beginning our meetings started with the question: How is everybody feeling? which helped us to share our impressions, feelings and to see other participants as real persons. Additionally, one could think of various games as icebreakers to make the atmosphere a bit more relaxed, and for people to open up. Having a good video connection is also very important, and Zoom worked out for us very well, so that often in our discussions one would have the feeling as though we are really sitting together in the same room.
When I was studying it was the rule at the university that lectures should be scheduled to begin in full hour, but in reality they had to begin at quarter past full hour. This would leave room for us to chat, connect and discuss matter from previous lectures. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see how this would work in an online course, so that the first 15 minutes of a video conference meeting are non-obligatory and reserved for chatting on various matters.
Apart from being better at performing in group tasks, networking among students are even important to keep them in the course. As Tinto (1975) drastically concluded that the reasons for students to drop out of a course are largely similar to those of committing suicide in a wider society – people who feel isolated, and are not taking part in the group of learners are not very likely to continue with the course nor to enjoy it. Therefore, dedicating time for group connections to happen is a time well spent for the success of classroom- as well as online-based courses.
References:
Lee, Y., &Choi, J. (2011). A review of online course dropout research: Implications for practice and future research. Educational Technology Research and Development, 59(5), 593-618.doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-010-9177-y
Tinto, V. (1975). Dropout from Higher Education: A Theoretical Synthesis of Recent Research. Review of Educational Research, 45(1), 89-125.doi: https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543045001089