Optimizing for online education in the age of coronavirus: six shifts to make
Homeschooling isn’t just at home, and online education isn’t just online. (Photo by mariannelin)
The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust us into a global experiment in distance learning and online education. Suddenly, millions of children and adolescents are no longer attending school. What do we do with them?
With The Rulerless School, I have adapted the traditional middle school curriculum to one that can be delivered fully online. It works! Here are some shifts that I recommend in order to make online education successful.
Realtime instruction isn’t as important as you think.
Believe it or not, my online students might go weeks without a video conference call. To receive direct instruction, they read or watch videos. We then have multiple ways for them to ask questions and seek feedback. My team and I are able to respond very quickly to help them move forward.
The students know that they can have a video call if they need one, but because of the way their assignments are designed, they usually don’t.
I hear horror stories of dozens or hundreds of students needing to be present for an online lecture. It’s a classic failure of instructional design. Why should the online experience mirror the brick-and-mortar one — especially when the brick-and-mortar one wasn’t that effective to begin with? It’s useful to question our assumptions.
Less is more.
If you’re expecting a twelve-year-old to follow through on an assignment on their own without adult intervention or direct supervision, you should not risk overwhelm.
The greater the stretch that you’re requiring, the more potential hand-holding you’ll have to do. The student may have trouble with the assignment’s instructions, its content, or its volume, requiring lengthy explanation or extensive one-on-one support.
Worse, an assignment that is too complex, too hard, or too big can trigger resistance on the part of the student, which can take hours, days, or even weeks to recover from and will likely involve multiple adults and much effort to fix.
This dynamic can be prevented. A triangle can have only one angle greater than 90 degrees; I propose that a given assignment should only have one of three challenging elements:
If the instructions are complex, the content should be simple and the assignment should be short.
If the content is challenging, the instructions should be simple and the assignment should be short.
If the assignment is long, the instructions should simple and the content should be familiar or straightforward.
Assignments should reveal the student’s thinking.
While there’s a place for multiple choice, true/false, and fill-in-the-blank questions, there’s little to be learned from them about what the student actually knows and understands. Instead, assignments should be designed to give the student room to share what they see. Asking the student to explain a concept in their own words, using diagrams if necessary, can allow you to gauge the student’s depth of knowledge, expose any misconceptions, and illumine the connections they’re making. As a result, your feedback can be more meaningful, and you can even create follow-up assignments that target specific areas of interest or address concepts that are still unclear.
Results are more important than time spent.
School isn’t prison. Measuring its effectiveness by tracking “butt in seat” time puts the focus on showing up instead of doing work.
Ideally, the student has an incentive to work efficiently so that they can be “done for the day” when their assignments are complete. However, a feedback system must be in place so that hasty or sloppy work is rejected. The student should know that work must be of sufficiently high quality or it will be handed back — and that this cycle will repeat until the work is on par with the student’s capabilities.
Moreover, if the assignments are indeed designed to reveal the student’s thinking, a student’s capabilities will be clearly evident and growth should be seen over time. If this is not the case, the student’s assignments might be too easy or too hard and might need to be more carefully calibrated.
If you let go of exactly how long a student is spending in school and instead focus on results, you will ensure that the student’s online education is actually working and, at the same time, save yourself from having to be the time police.
“Soft skills” must take center stage.
Many of the students I’ve worked with come to me without knowing how to ask for help, how to ask clarifying questions, how to manage their time, how to deal with frustration, how to set a goal, or how to collaborate. They don’t have a well-developed growth mindset or much grit to speak of. They don’t know how to name or talk about their emotions. They have little experience grappling with juicy challenges and think that if they struggle, it means they’re stupid.
In a traditional classroom, these missing skills aren’t so problematic. At least, that’s what I conclude from the fact that kids go through six or seven years of school without developing them. But learning online requires that students learn to advocate for themselves. You can’t just sit there waiting for someone to see that you’re getting frustrated — you have to speak up.
Therefore, online programs work best if these skills are explicitly taught. We learn about asking questions, pacing ourselves, and taking breaks. We also directly address the weird ways our brains process and retain information and skills so that we don’t get angry at ourselves for, say, forgetting something we learned last week.
In this way, students are, deliberately and intentionally, building the maturity and fortitude necessary for independent learning, increasing their ability to be successful in this format with every passing day.
Online school doesn’t always mean online learning.
School may be online, but that doesn’t mean a student has to spend all their time staring at a screen. There are plenty of educational activities, from sports to handcrafts to reading to playing a musical instrument, that can be introduced or reinforced online while not taking place in that context. A student’s online program can be seen as a hub of information and connection, but not all of the action has to happen there. Assignments can include nature walks, pencil-to-paper drawing, reading actual paper books, performing foreign language skits, and so on. Photos and videos capturing the related products and processes can be uploaded for teachers and classmates to enjoy — and maybe some of these offline learning activities can even be undertaken just for fun.
What works in one format doesn’t necessarily translate to another, which gives us a chance to reevaluate our approach and optimize for the online format. But let’s face it — not all of our traditional strategies work all that well anyway. We have an exciting opportunity to transform education for good. This storm will pass, and teachers and students will eventually return to their physical schools, but perhaps they can take with them some of the best lessons of online learning.