The invisible students
Unmasking why online learners never show their faces and meeting them where they are
The clock is about to reach the hour and still no students have arrived. This isn’t the first time. A sense of anxiety takes hold when one appears. By 5 minutes past, the room has grown to 4. This might be as good as it gets.
You’ve designed learning experiences. You made group work a feature because you were told it was good pedagogy. The one thing that is missing are the learners.
In the past students’ attendance was marked and graded. Now students are given choices and the extrinsic motivation to attend has been removed. They are being pulled in a multitude of directions to get work done, provide for their families, travel to campus, afford the tech to be online. All of this makes it increasingly difficult for students to come to class at a specific time in a specific place.
We asked some of our students about this and surprisingly the ones who did come to class were there to meet each other, learning something from us was a bi-product of that attendance.
“Online uni is my only option if I wish to study whilst working and I have often felt very disconnected and alone as I wasn’t sure how to make friends in my units when we weren’t physically seeing each other. I have very much enjoyed this course, not necessarily for the content but how it was run and how it made me feel and it was extremely flexible for my schedule.”
This response got us thinking about why we were doing live classes. Overall, we believe that being in a class synchronously with students is fundamentally more important for us and our identity than it is for the students. Certainly, their choice of not coming will tell us that. However, the more often we have classes of invisible students the less we do feel like we are making any meaningful progress.
Across our five courses we tried some creative solutions:
- having no live class at all instead offering one-on-one support sessions,
- live drop-in sessions with flexible requirements,
- live interactive sessions that encourage more asynchronous participation,
- traditional live online sessions reduced in frequency to encourage students to attend without feeling the need to come every week.
Needless to say the no live class with one-on-one consultations was the most successful. Students felt they were provided with personalised experiences even though many of the same questions were answered across each person. This course also included a well subscribed to online asynchronous experience in VoiceThread in which the students could talk to each other about the course content. This provided opportunities to get to know each other even when they weren’t meeting.
“it was frightening [having to record myself] but at the same time it was actually really nice finishing the semester knowing people’s faces and voices, it definitely made it feel much more like an in-person class which was fantastic!”
Across our courses, where attendance was consistently low, at best 5-10% of students might make themselves physically visible to us, we saw our students in the asynchronous spaces. These spaces weren’t always ones where we would see them. VoiceThread did provide that, and we had 34 hours participation in one course, 13 hours in another and 5 hours in a third. The largest one being the one that didn’t have any live tutorials but also a requirement that VoiceThread be used for assessment (see our blog post about this). Where we really saw the students was in the percentage who clicked into the online learning resources.
The learning resources showed a staggering level of interaction with 3 of the courses having an average of over 95% interaction (95%, 97% and 99%). The other two courses were lower at 68% and 73% but still a significantly higher level than those attending live sessions.
The students appear to be invisible but only in the sense that we can’t see them physically in either an online or on-campus space. If we consider that they are still there in a place of their choosing, interacting at a time of their choosing and hopefully making choices about what content they want to engage with most, then we can reframe our measure of success as a teacher.
Our perception of professional identity is what is at stake. If we place our success as an educator on the number of students who turn up to class, we are destined to failure in these times of student choice and flexibility. If we reframe our success in the design of compelling online course materials, then we can start to find measures in the analytics.
Students will be visible again, not in your class but in the assessment they submit, and in the results they achieve. None of this is work you are doing as a stand at the front of the room teacher with expert knowledge to give.
Consider this quote from one of our students:
“This unit has made me feel more connected than ever to the other people in my unit, I could put faces to names and was able to get personality through the camera.”
What do you think they are talking about? It isn’t a live class, but an asynchronous class designed to provide the best parts of the live experience.
You already know what good learning experiences look like. Imagine what that is and find a way to make that magic happen without you being there. Take that one great group activity and put it online in a place the students can access, give them a task, and ask them to report back. It doesn’t have to be difficult but it does have to make the students visible to you and to each other.
Join the Discussion
Are your students invisible? To you or to each other? What have you tried to do?
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