Designing More Engaging Online Courses

Jean Jacoby, Director, Digital Innovation at Massey University

Jean Jacoby, Director, Digital Innovation at Massey University

As a discipline, education in general, and online education in particular, is plagued by promises of the next big thing. The internet, mobile learning, MOOC, micro-credentials, and currently, generative AI have all been touted as the disruptive innovation going to change the face of education. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, university online learning has not changed for the last 30 years. Course completion rates and qualification retention rates for those qualifications delivered in online mode remain lower than their 'traditional' or on-campus counterparts. Of course, there are many complex reasons for this, not least of which is the fact that online or distance study attracts a larger proportion of part-time, mature, second-chance, and minoritized cohorts, all more vulnerable to the ‘life happens’ effects which interrupt study than their fulltime, on-campus peers.

Addressing these issues and implementing approaches that reduce the gap between online and on-campus student outcomes has been a challenge for many universities since the advent of ‘distance’ study, back in the day of correspondence universities. The urgency of reducing this gap has been exacerbated by the 'pivot to online' during the Covid years, which appears to have permanently changed student behavior, with many traditional universities finding that even full-time students are no longer attending classes regularly. Instead, there is an increasing expectation that the university supports more flexible approaches to learning, which more effectively accommodates the demands of life outside of study. Consequently, despite the challenges associated with online university study, demand for it has never been greater.

The rise of online learning has seen a concomitant rise in the profession of online learning designers. These so-called 'third-space professionals' occupy an uneasy position in the hierarchical structures of universities, sitting across both academic and professional roles, and while their expertise is recognized by their peers, it is often not acknowledged by the academics with whom they work, meaning that there is often resistance to implementing their advice. This brings me to the point of this piece: although connected, web-based online learning is widely practiced, we don’t do it consistently well, and our frequently misplaced belief in the value of the tools we provide for our students has negative consequences for their learning and their success.

“The support of a learning designer can make the difference between a course that engages students deeply and critically with the content and one which presents an overwhelming and ultimately disengaging accumulation of content.”

Designing online learning appears deceptively easy – master the features of the particular learning management system, and off you go. We all spend so much of our time in online environments it feels like a no-brainer that we should intuitively know what good online learning design should look like. Only we don't.

The reality is that while the tools are easy to learn, the traps and pitfalls of online learning design are much harder to identify and avoid. It is tempting to use our favorite website or social media channel as the model for an online course, but this is likely to have significant unintended consequences for learning. Platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram, which engage us by providing an addictive stream of new things to keep us online, are deliberately designed to encourage us to interact superficially with multiple input streams. Designing an online course using similar principles is likely to lead to cognitive overload and surface learning.

Similarly, the lack of physicality in online environments means online courses are frequently the site of what can only be described as digital hoarding – courses bloated by the number of resources presented to students. Online environments hide the time cost of learning materials in a way that traditional on-campus classes do not. Without careful curation, the proliferation of learning materials can result in an online course that is no longer a coherent learning experience but rather an unstructured and complex collection of resources, making it impossible for the student to distinguish between valuable and unimportant information.

Understanding the causes of digital hoarding in course design would take more than the space available for this article, but one key factor is worth considering: hoarding often occurs as compensation for the absence of other socio-psychological needs. In terms of online learning design, teachers accustomed to the energy of the physical classroom often mourn the loss of their synchronous and personal interactions with students. Without expert guidance and support for the development of appropriate mechanisms to maintain these interactions, online teachers may find themselves using content as an extension of and as a proxy for their teacher identity.

Engaging with an expert learning designer is a reliable way to address this challenge. Rather than seeking out the mythical ed-tech silver bullet to slay the online learning werewolf, engaging with a learning designer can help teachers create clear pathways through learning for themselves and their students. A coherent learning narrative is an essential part of this process.

A learning narrative tells the story of the course from beginning to end. It guides, supports, and cajoles the students through the highs and lows of learning a subject. It helps them make sense of each activity or resource in a course by overtly unpacking the connections between it and the learning that has gone before and which comes after. Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of human communication, but all too often, we forget the value of telling the story of our course or discipline because we are focused on overcoming the challenges of technology and the platform.

The support of a learning designer can make the difference between a course that engages students deeply and critically with the content and one which presents an overwhelming and ultimately disengaging accumulation of content. But this can only happen when the expertise of the so-called ‘third-space’ professionals is recognized and acknowledged as a core part of the online learning design process.