XplanaZine

It’s easy to take the enlisted or young officer’s tuition assistance money. But in so doing, many colleges and universities betray a fundamental trust by providing a substandard online learning experience in exchange for their money or indebtedness. It is not unusual for online courses with deployed military personnel to have completion rates as low as 30 percent. Blaming this on the conditions of the military or on the Secretary of Defense is a way of avoiding responsibility. Instead, universities and colleges must respond by analyzing their programs and processes, and make a good-faith effort to make the necessary changes.

When accepting military contracts and students, universities must keep in mind that in an all-volunteer military, many enlisted in order to pay for college, and they are putting their lives on the line, in harm’s way for years on end in order to have access to education, and thus a future for themselves and their families. They may not have the background that some of the more privileged students may have, and will require more support services. Further, they are often under enormous stress — psychological, physical, and time-related — and accommodations should be made.

Below are the top reasons for failure in an online course delivered to the military. This is a brief overview. Each topic could be an entire article, and will be dealt with at a later date. In the meantime, it is important to realize that to provide effective e-learning for military involves a commitment of financial, intellectual, and human resources.

Failure to Communicate with Student: This is probably the top reason for failure, and simultaneously the easiest and the most difficult to remedy. The student does not receive emails or announcements which give instructions for course procedures, registration, or financial issues. Multiple attempts to communicate with the student (without spamming) should be made. There should be adequate redundancy in the system.

There should be a clear chain of approach:

1. faculty first-line, personalized communication (email, postings, etc.)
2. department-level communication
3. centralized quality-control entity for needs assessments, calendars with timelines, formative evaluations, summative evaluations, general announcements.

Poorly Defined Learning Outcomes : The deployed student does not always have the luxury of a phone call, and chat rooms are often ineffective due to time zone differences and time of online access. If the deployed student has a total of 20 minutes of connectivity on the “morale computers,” it is not easy to work out misunderstandings about what he/she is supposed to learn in a class.

Learning outcomes should be

1. clearly stated in words
2. illustrated through tasks
3. modeled with successful examples.

Badly Designed Instructional Tasks: It is one thing to design an instructional task, and it is another thing altogether to do it. It is easy to forget that even the simplest tasks take much more time and have much higher level of complexity if students are accessing through a slow modem, in an internet café environment, or have frequent interruptions due to conditions in wartime. A specialist should take a look at the way that the learning management system is being used and to try to minimize the number of times one must change from screen to screen (each requiring painfully slow reload times). Tasks requiring long time online (connectivity), (online quizzes and tests), involved research that cannot be downloaded, and course content that cannot be downloaded and saved to a local drive will be doomed to failure. Timed access — tests, digital drop boxes, and other items that automatically shut down after certain amount of time will block the student, as will tasks that are either timed, or require specific times of access.

Inaccessible or Late Course Materials : If it is not possible to obtain course books or materials in a timely fashion, accommodations should be made so that the students can obtain the content in a different manner, at least for the first few weeks. One effective manner is to phase in the use of the textbooks, and to make the materials available online for the first quarter or third of the class.

Faculty Out of Loop — Can’t Perform Basic Tasks : Faculty members are absolutely central to the success of any online program. They need to have achieved a basic level of competence in skills as well as instructional strategies. Further, they need to have readily available support and mentoring, in order to avoid the sense of isolation that so often occurs. Because course and online instruction procedures vary from college to college, it is important to offer ongoing online support and mentoring to faculty — avoid the idea of training as the one-time “inoculation.”

Too Many Intermediaries in Support Services : When there are administrative intermediaries such as eArmyU in the instructional loop, unexpected snags can happen as students communicate to eArmyU for answers to questions, when the question should have been directed to the faculty member. eArmyU and other intermediaries need to understand the nature of process and be able to identify when to “escalate” the question to the education partner, and avoid wasting time “circling” or “ping-ponging” in fruitless back-and-forths that do not address the real issues.

Courses Not Aligned with Needs of Students: Courses and course curricula lose their freshness and should be updated each time offered. A complete course and curriculum review / retuning should be done each two or three years, depending on the topic and the rate of change. Knowledge management is very important, and a team of subject matter experts should review (rather than just one subject matter expert.) Relevancy and timeliness are keys to deep learning and engagement. Without it, there are few or no incentives. Decisions should not be made “on high” and far removed, but be made with as much connection to real students and faculty as possible.

Failure to Provide Writing Support: Mentoring in academic writing should be provided. The students should be guided and be provided support in everything from composition, grammar, syntax, organization, persuasion, and argumentation to academic research, citation, library resources. Instead of making it a separate activity, it should flow with the actual needs of courses, and be provided in ways that naturally integrate with achieving the learning outcomes for each learning unit, and course. It should also apply to the overall program.

Inappropriate Assessment Strategies: Testing and assessment should be natural outgrowths of the learning activities in the course. Learning activities should involve practice (conceptual, cognitive, and even skill-driven) practice for the actual assessment. Assessment strategies and tips should be included as well.

Learning Management System Issues: How difficult is it to utilize is the learning management system? Is there an over-reliance on it? How granular and re-usable are the learning objects, or the “building blocks” that are being used to populate the learning management system? What is the scalability of the model?

An online tutorial for using the online learning system is rarely enough. Instead, the learning tasks should be made in such a way that the student can master the learning management system through self-exploration.

Key to success: Slowly build in complexity, and add tasks for the student to do. Do not ask the student to master all aspects of the learning management system in Unit One. Build slowly, in an “add-on” manner.

Outdated or Irrelevant Content / Badly Situated Learning: Learning programs fail to engage soldiers when the material seems irrelevant, or, even worse — insulting. Situating learning means making connection to real-life contexts and tasks, which emulates apprenticeship. Know your student and his/her values. Do not insult them.

Rigid Deadlines and Policies, Counterproductive Administrative Policies: In seeking efficiency, colleges and universities unwittingly set up their deployed military students for failure, particularly in rigid add-drop dates, Incomplete policies, and automatic “Failure” grades. They set off a domino reaction as military policies with tuition assistance, etc. are activated. Policy should be set so that it coordinates with military policies, and should not further complicate things.

No Redundancy in Case of Component Breakdown: What happens when a unit or component in the course breaks down, due either to connectivity issues or scheduling? The key is to have a back-up and to build in redundancy. For example, if a student cannot post to the discussion board because the computer has extreme security and firewalls, the student should have an alternative way to complete course requirements.

Hard-to-Access Library Resources: Libraries are working to reduce the size of scanned documents and researching new ways to zip files so that they do not take so much time. Further, multimedia delivery must be made more efficient — utilizing some of the techniques of XBox Live and massively multiplayer role-playing games. In the meantime, it is important not to lock content up behind layer upon layer of password protection.

War and Post-War Stress Issues: Finally, courses should be designed to be as streamlined, useful, and engaging as possible. They should connect directly with the academic, career, and personal goals of the learners. More than anything, they should respect the fact that many of the military students may be suffering — not only the pain and anxiety of separation from loved ones, and being in harm’s way — but also physically and psychologically. Recent studies have suggested that one in 11 soldiers will suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome. In addition to psychological issues, according to many sources, more than 12,000 soldiers in the recent war on terror have suffered from serious and disabling injuries. These soldiers deserve respect and are entitled to accommodation. We must not betray their trust.