Removing the Distance from Distance Learning Through a Personalized Approach

Covid and the accompanying recession have made interacting from remote locations among various parties a way of life. Well before these events occurred, distance learning was a very active part of the educational process at the University/ College levels.

It is not enough merely to have distance learning as one of educational modalities, we need to make it a more effective way to interact with our students. Distance need not be a barrier, but a learning opportunity.

The key for removing distance as a barrier for online learning starts and ends with the students’ views of student success. How do we determine how to measure student success? All too often we, as administrators and faculty, seem to provide our own definitions of what student success means. We measure it in a number of ways, such as persistence rates, retentions rates, some type of grading metrics, or graduation rates. They are all focused on quantitative analyses dimensions. How about hearing from the students about what their expectations may be in regard to student success?

Several months ago, we were working on a College project to better understand student success from both students’ expectations and perceptions. To this end a brief four question survey was submitted to 60 seniors who had basically taken only online courses during their entire college careers.

Our first question asked the students to define what their expectations were of college. The reoccurring response to that question was using the knowledge they gained in college to better their careers. Most of our Students are already in their career fields, so this expectation was very important to them.

Two other questions in the survey asked students to identify:

1. What aspects of your time at the University have been helpful to you?
2. What could we have done to improve your experiences at the University?

It was important to gain feedback from these two questions in preparation for planning and implementing ways of possibly reducing distance learning barriers. The results of these two questions provided some meaningful information:

1. Faculty, flexibility of courses, knowledge, quality courses, compassion, real world examples.
2. More Faculty to Student interactions, timely feedback, meaningful feedback, networking opportunities, more of a personal touch, sharing of knowledge and experiences, response time to inquiries, more interactive courses, boring course structures, cost of textbooks.

 With this information and that from numerous coaching sessions with students we now felt ready to develop some action plans to address the barriers to distance learning.

We realized that it was important to make most, if not all, of our online courses feel more like classroom in-person courses. That involved a number of engagement activities placed into our online courses. For these engagement activities to succeed a greater partnership between students and faculty had to be forged.

A first step was providing faculty with more data on the students in their course. A device was created that was called Dashboard Data. The information on this site had specific educational data on each student in a course. Some of this data included the student’s GPA, degree program, major, number of courses taken in a given year, and how long the student was at the University.

Now we turned our attention to the responses from Students on the question of how we could have improved their experiences at the University. These items we considered the speed bumps that needed to be addressed to help minimize the impact of distance in learning.

The engagement activities that we focused on recommending to senior management based on the Student feedback covered the following areas:

• Increasing the number of opportunities for students and faculty to interact. This included 1:1 or group Zoom Sessions in place of written assignments.
• Encouraging students to register for Coaching Sessions where they can discuss with certified coaches or their course instructors academic or personal goals.
• Reducing class sizes from a maximum of 35 students in some courses to 30 students.
• Providing feedback to students on all assignments from 7 days maximum to possibly 3 days.
• Identifying from both Dashboard Data and conversations with students the names of students who are at risk of possibly dropping out of the University.
• Inserting in selected courses, initially, more interactive assignments, like drag and drop, and discussing topics selected by the students.
• Asking faculty to introduce themselves and explain their learning methods for the course either through Zoom Sessions or by videos. This approach will go a long way to establishing a positive climate for any course.
• Establishing interactive networking opportunities for all of the students and for students in a specific course or discipline.
• Connecting courses to industries where possible. This is meant to bring course material into the real world.
• For the sharing the experiences and knowledge involving both students and faculty, we thought of the greater use of Zoom Sessions and more detailed faculty responses on assignments.
• Creating more pertinent course structures from the students’ viewpoints by using Open Educational Resources (OER) methods instead of textbooks in some courses. This would also save Students the cost of pricey textbooks.

These ideas have been discussed for some time. Some of the above engagement activities are being implemented on a limited basis, with very positive results from feedback received from both students and faculty. These ensuing activities are now operational in some degree:

• Optional Zoom Introductory and Discussion Sessions are being inserted into a number of courses.
• There is a very active Coaching Program for both undergraduate and graduate students.
• A Student At-Risk Program was piloted with the hope of expanding the Program on a wider student scope.
• A greater number of courses are using OER methods instead of textbooks with very strong positive comments from both students and faculty.
• Various student networking possibilities are being explored or enhanced.
• Numerous engagement activities are being employed in numerous courses.
• A greater interaction with industry leaders is ongoing.

While we are making progress on reducing the negative impact of distance to learning, we still have a long way to go. A very positive movement in that direction is underway. End of course evaluations by our Students clearly indicate their approval of these efforts.

We look forward to continuing our efforts to personalize online learning by reducing the “distance” factors as  much as possible for our students.