9 Online Learning Environment
Developing an online learning environment from a student-centered perspective.
To promote an engaging student-centered experience, many online educators have found it helpful to focus on creating three forms of interaction for students in the online environment:
Student-content interaction, where instructors provide active learning experiences for students (meaningful learning activity plus reflection).
Student-student interaction, where instructors structure the learning community and make it clear to students how they should interact with others in the class.
Student-instructor interaction, where instructors create a framework for how they will interact with students during the learning experience.
These three forms of interaction don’t happen spontaneously. They require planning, intention, and instructional design. Furthermore, these three types of interaction aren’t prescriptive—they do not require the use of a particular type of learning activity or assessment. Through these interactions, we are reaching for broad goals that can be achieved in many different ways.
Three Questions to Consider in Student-Centered Online Teaching and Learning
To take a student-centered approach to teaching and learning, consider the tools you have at your disposal, and ask three questions about your course:
How will my students interact with the course content? Beyond reading, listening to/viewing lectures, what will students actually DO with the course content?
How will my students interact with other students? Beyond completing assignments and assessments independently, how will online students work together to ensure that they feel like they are part of a learning community and have the opportunity to collaborate, think critically, be intellectually challenged, and make meaning with others?
How will my students interact with me, their instructor? Now that you aren’t in the classroom with your students, how will students be able to interact with you? How might you guide student learning while also being flexible and trying to accommodate different student needs? What assignment expectations do you need to convey? What information do you need to clarify for students?
Asking these questions can help you see the course from the student’s point of view and think about online instruction in the context of connections rather than focusing solely on delivering content.
Student-Content Interaction
Student-content interaction is all about having students DO something with the course content or topic. Reading and listening to lectures will be part of many classes, but the passive receipt of information isn’t sufficient to help students engage with the course and meet course learning outcomes. Instead, we should create opportunities for active learning, which is when students DO something meaningful related to the course content and then reflect on their learning.
Student-Student Interaction
When students interact with each other, they feel like they are part of a learning community, but this interaction also helps students engage in higher-order thinking that would be more challenging to accomplish if they were studying alone. Through collaboration, students brainstorm, deliberate, disagree, compromise, and achieve consensus—all ways of thinking that are difficult to do singly.
Student-Instructor Interaction
The third form of interaction is student-instructor interaction, which should involve more than just answering student questions. For fully online classes, the US Department of Education requires that instructors provide regular, substantive, and instructor-led interactions to distinguish online classes from correspondence courses. These guidelines help online instructors provide strong student-instructor interaction.
