George Veletsianos - Learning Online: The Student Experience

In multiple conversations at multiple institutions over the years, I have heard educated, passionate, and good-willed people talk with excitement about the number of students participating in online and distance courses. More than a million students in Canada. More than 100,000 in the early massive open online courses (MOOCs), more than 20,000 in recent ones. More than 200 enrolled in a for-credit foundations course at a local university. Nearly two million online learners at one of the worlds well-known open and mega university. While such figures are impressive, an enthusiastic and all-consuming focus on the numbers can lead us to lose sight of Irma, Magda, Hassan, James, and Asma; or of the reasons that Anna failed to complete her degree; or Nick and Cassandra who were compelled to enroll in higher education while raising a family. Nor is it just our fascination with scale and numbers that leads us astray. A variety of common discourses, practices, and pressures operate in similar ways to alienate us from students and their realitiessuch as the adoption of business-like language to refer to students as prospects or financial constraints that move us to prioritize goals like competitiveness and growth over more community-oriented or people-centered goals.

The future of higher education is at a crucial turning point. True, the university as an institution is facing immense pressures and a myriad of challenges, and various aspects of it are badly in need of tweaks, reform, and perhaps bottom-up rethinking. Online education, however, is not a panacea, but just one aspect of what higher education may look like in the future. To help create that future, I argue that the people involved in online educationinstructors, researchers, administrators, instructional designers, directors of centers of teaching and learning, policymakers, entrepreneurs, technology developers, and higher education consultantsneed to better understand the needs and experiences of our students. I include myself in this group, and for brevitys sake I will refer to this group as we throughout the book. We need to understand students as people, as individuals who have agency, desires, mishaps, dreams, life-changing accidents; as individuals who face the daily minutiae of life; and as people who may even have instructive and insightful ideas about the future of education. The purpose of this book, therefore, is to examine online learning through the lens of student experience and help us narrow our distance from the online students we serve.

To that end, the book is both descriptive and analytical. Each of the following chapters focuses on an important or noteworthy aspect of online learners experiences by offering, first, an actual or composite story from an online student gathered from my own research and experiences or occasionally from other reports, followed by an analysis of that story that also examines and synthesizes some of the existing research on the theme. I was inspired to use this approach after reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a book in which Dr. Oliver Sacks presented short narratives of patients with neurological disorders that enabled him to discuss various aspects of neurology. By offering a deeper understanding and appreciation of learner experienceswhich Parrish (2005) describes as the ways learners interact with and respond to content, activities, instructional methods, instructors, and the context within which learning and instruction happenthis book is intended to help us learn more about our students and uncover ways we can refine and improve online teaching, learning, and education.

Online education has a distinctive quality, one that risks creating and widening the distance between us and our students. That quality is the physical distance that separates us from students and requires us to take active steps to build and foster our relationship with them. In online learning settings, students participate in courses from locations that are usually at a distance from the educational institution offering the course, typically through such activities as completing assignments at home, listening to an assigned podcast on a commute, or studying for an exam at a public library. This geographic dispersal is what advocates of online learning are referring to when they claim that online learning can take place anywhere. In this context, courses may meet in real time (synchronous learning) or never meet in real time (asynchronous learning). Some online courses may meet on a regular and consistent basis much like conventional face-to-face courses, others may have optional scheduled meetings, and some may be asynchronous with optional one-on-one tutorials. In all these cases, learners experiences take place at a distance from their instructors and classmates. This may even be true for online courses taken by students enrolled in predominantly face-to-face institutions, such as an online course offered to allow students from different majors to fulfill a requirement not offered by their own department.