XplanaZine

Although it might be efficient to set up a fully automated, fully functioning learning space, minded by HAL from 2001, A Space Odyssey, very few students will actually finish their courses in that charming, fully sanitized and free from human frailty utopia. Why is that? That’s a good question.

The problem boils down to boredom, self-doubt, and lack of motivation. The more human the environment, the more likely it is to engage the student’s emotions, and make them really CARE about their course.

Further, students become bored, impatient, or even angry when they believe that their time is being wasted, or that their studies are irrelevant. Connecting to a human being often means taking the time to “listen” in the highly visual, often text-centered virtual environment. It also means taking the time to design activities that will maximize the students’ points of contact with each other, seek and discover what they have in common.

By doing so, one establishes connection between course content and the outside world — the world that means something to the students. Ideally, the connections will tie to students’ interests, goals, and experience.

Rehumanization is Easy

Rehumanizing the learning space doesn’t have to be complicated or “Super-Tech.” In the early days of online education, individuals thought that the best way to rehumanize a distance education experience was to try to replicate the appearance of a classroom. Many departments decided to tape their professors as they delivered lectures, and to deliver them over the internet. The other approach was to create PowerPoint presentations that were then synchronized with slides and contained a space for synchronous chat.

These were classic “talking heads” — mindnumbingly boring to an audience used to Hollywood and video games. Even worse, that solution was terribly expensive and had a shelf life of about 18 months — until the next generation of hardware or software came along.

What happened? Even when the program administrators could overcome the technical difficulties, they found that the students were, in these settings, passive learners. There was a lack of meaningful interaction.

What is “meaningful interaction” anyway?

Meaningful interaction takes place

1. when communities of practice are developed, where people engage in supportive activities (answering each other’s questions, etc.);
2. when on-demand skills acquisition takes place in order to perform a task — for example, you go out to an archive and download an article that helps you accomplish your homework task;
3. when guidance and positive reinforcement is received by an instructor who has learned to “listen” very well in the virtual environment.”Listening” is vital in an online environment because it establishes “real” responsiveness - not the coerciveness or ego-crush of an automated response generated through artificial intelligence.

Encourage Community

Even the most basic information about you can be a huge ice-breaker to your students. If they know something about your research interests, your scholarship, your current focus, and your experience, it helps them feel a sense of confidence, and they will trust your guidance. If you let them know something about you as a person, they can attach a human face to you. The visual of this — the very idea of your humanity — mediates the learning space. It adjusts the learning space, and the assumptions and values that the student brings to the learning space are subtly adjusted. You are both approachable and human. This is absolutely vital.

“Listening” in e-learning

Now, granted, if you’re listening to a podcast or an audio file, you’re truly “listening.” But the listening I’m talking about is something else. It is, in a nutshell, the moment in which real communication is reached - when the circuit boards light up because the electricity is flowing.

You can show that you’re listening by

1. making substantive comments to the student’s paper or discussion board comments. Don’t just say “very good” - explain what it was that made you think a particular passage was effective;
2. respond to questions by answering them in a timely fashion and provide the information needed;
3. keeping your comments brief, but meaningful. If you write a page-long comment, the student will stop “listening’ and start trying to defend herself.

How do you make sure that the learner is “listening?”

1. Set a good tone - start each communication with an affirmation;
2. Avoid “humor” - (it can come across as sarcasm);
3. Ask questions and connect issues to something in your own life and be willing to reveal something about yourself;
4. Avoid inflammatory or judgmental words. Imagine how you would react if you received an e-mail, or saw something posted in the discussion board;
5. Keep as neutral as possible in the discussion boards - encourage and react to students, but be careful not to exclude some, or target others.

Perhaps the most effective instructional strategy to employ is to design activities that require the student to relate the course content to their lives. This can be as basic as having students keep journals, or to find examples of what they are studying in current news or world events. The events may be ephemeral and the concepts may be abstract. However, when you connect the two, you establish relevancy and emotional engagement.

Bringing Together Online Instruction and Real Life: Putting Content into the Context

If you can take it one step further and allow the student sufficient flexibility to use the content to solve real-life dilemmas, you demonstrate that you care about the well-being of your student. This is golden. Magic can happen at this point.

Avoid skill-and-drill and rote memorization activities. Also avoid over-reliance on the discussion board - an over-reliance on it as the primary method of instruction can be frustrating for students because the comments that the instructor makes are public. It is awkward, and it often appears that the instructor “plays favorites” — even when that was not the case. Further, one can unconsciously slip into the trap of unwittingly targeting or humiliating someone.

Remember — dehumanization does not simply mean giving over to automation and avoiding human contact. It also can mean becoming desensitized to individuality, and losing awareness of the fact that the name / face on the screen is a human being with a complex array of beliefs, circumstances, and socio-cultural influences.