University of Notre Dame

Sonia Howell is the director of the University of Notre Dame's Office of Digital Learning, which is part of a broader unit called Notre Dame Learning. She leads a team of learning designers, creative and media professionals and program managers as they collaborate with colleagues across ND Learning and the university’s faculty to produce end-to-end online courses as well as digital learning experiences in traditional classrooms. Howell recently helped lead a task force charged with setting the next generation of Notre Dame’s digital strategy.

The term “digital classroom” is usefully broad. It can include everything from the use of digital tools such as video, AI and XR in face-to-face teaching to a fully asynchronous program in which all learning occurs in a virtual space. Because the term is so capacious, the form the digital classroom takes is deeply dependent on the mission of the institution offering the educational experience.

At the University of Notre Dame, our residential model and the shared bond between faculty and students it fosters are of paramount importance. Over the past 12 years, our work in Notre Dame Learning’s Office of Digital Learning has been guided by the conviction that the relationships that define a Notre Dame education must also shape the design of its digital learning initiatives.

The university’s Summer Online program offers one example of how the digital classroom, when designed with intentionality and care, can complement and enhance the educational tradition that defines us as an institution.

Aligning Online Learning with Institutional Mission

Like many universities with a foundational commitment to the liberal arts, Notre Dame values face-to-face learning as integral to the education we provide. For this reason and with few exceptions, the university does not offer credit-bearing online courses for undergraduates during the standard academic year (fall and spring semesters). At the same time, however, the pandemic brought greater visibility to the interest of residential students across the higher education landscape in taking at least some courses online, with flexibility cited as the primary driver.

Notre Dame’s Summer Online program, which started with just four courses in 2014 but now features offerings from more than 60 Notre Dame instructors, helps the university meet this demand by responding to needs that are difficult to meet fully within the regular academic year.

Through Summer Online, our students are able to progress through their programs or explore courses they could not fit into a busy fall or spring semester schedule. Departments can alleviate pressure on enrollments during the academic year and create additional teaching opportunities for their faculty. The university’s colleges and schools can reduce the number of transfer credits taken by Notre Dame students, which results in greater curricular alignment and generates additional revenue.

It’s also worth noting that while most students who take a Notre Dame Summer Online course attend the university, the program’s offerings are open to anyone with a high school degree, making credit-bearing Notre Dame courses available to learners well beyond our campus.

“When designed with intentionality and care, the digital classroom can strengthen students' sense of community and belonging.”

Designing for Relational Learning

From the outset, we knew that Notre Dame’s Summer Online could not be designed as a fully asynchronous experience, as students moving independently through course materials would make it difficult, if not impossible, to build and center relationships among them and with their instructors. All Summer Online courses are therefore bichronous, combining asynchronous work with required synchronous live sessions.

This structure allows the program to offer the flexibility students seek in the summer without sacrificing the faculty student and student-student contact that gives a Notre Dame course its shape. Asynchronous work gives students time to encounter material on their own while synchronous engagement gives the course a shared rhythm and creates space to work more deeply with faculty, peers and the intellectual practices of the discipline. For most Summer Online courses, enrollment is capped at 25 students so that the course remains small enough to support relational learning.

None of this is to suggest that online learning doesn’t present distinct challenges to relationship-building. A live Zoom session isn’t the same as sitting in a physical classroom together and designing relational learning experiences in a bichronous format takes time and intent.

For many Notre Dame instructors, their Summer Online course is the first learning experience they’ve created explicitly for the online environment and learning design and academic media professionals in the Office of Digital Learning accompany them from design through delivery. Consultations with learning designers help faculty make explicit decisions about how students prepare, how synchronous time is used and how faculty presence is sustained when learning is distributed across time and space. The work faculty do in thinking intentionally about all aspects of course design for their online courses often carries over into their in-person teaching.

The relational work of Summer Online also extends beyond the course and the faculty design partnership. Because the program supports the movement of students through departments and degree programs on our residential campus, it has depended from the beginning on sustained collaboration with administrators, deans, department chairs, the Office of the Registrar and other key university stakeholders.

These relationships have allowed the program to mature from that initial offering of four small courses into a steadystate portfolio that now serves more than 1,000 students each summer. The purposeful integration of Summer Online within the university’s larger, predominantly residential curricular ecosystem also helps explain why the program has contributed to a reduction in Notre Dame students seeking to transfer in credits from other institutions and why more than 90 percent of Summer Online faculty teach again in subsequent years.

But beyond the numbers, Summer Online has shown that digital learning can offer our students flexibility without detaching them from the residential experience and that such learning need not mark a departure from the relationships that define the university’s educational mission. Rather, when designed with intentionality and care, the digital classroom can create new pathways for students to pursue their academic goals while still strengthening their sense of community and belonging.