How can we engage online learners?

Photo by Filip Mroz on unsplash

In my first post in this blog series I outlined the changes taking place in schools due to the adoption of online forms of education. I promised I would pose at least 3 key questions around this context. In my follow-up post, I posed a key question for teachers to answer if they wished to become successful online educators. Below is the second question I promised:

Several years ago, when it first became clear that online education was becoming more prevalent, questions were asked about the format of educational content. At the time, in the early years of online education, we witnessed teachers taking content that had been traditionally delivered, and pushing it across into the online environment. This practice quickly became known as 'shovelware' because teachers were ultimately shovelling their content across to the online platform. Quantity was more important than quality, because a rapid population of new digital spaces was deemed to be expedient - the pedagogy could wait.

This strategy didn't work. In fact, it was an unmitigated disaster. Students were unimpressed by reading reams and reams of content online, with little or no possibility of interaction. They craved active engagement - if they are passive in online environments, it isn't long before they lost interest. Huge attrition rates still exist today in online education, especially in some of the latest forms such as MOOCs. As online education evolved, it quickly became clear that new forms of content needed to be developed, and new forms of pedagogy needed to be devised to support the new ways of learning that were emerging.

Discussion groups and forums, hyperlinked content, videos, audio in the form of podcasts, and ultimately, user generated content emerged as important forms of online activity. Dialogue between students and their tutors became especially important due to the geographical separation. User generated content developed to include blogs, status updates, voting, aggregation, curation, remixing, repurposing and sharing of content, podcasts, wikis, videos, images and other online creation of content. These activities supplemented the content, and in some ways, replaced it as the new learning objects of online education.

Today, an important, vital question for all educators to address is this:

What forms of content, activity and pedagogy are needed now to ensure the success of online education?

What are your views, words of advice or supplementary questions? Please post them in the comments box below.


How can we engage online learners? by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's