Effective Online Educators

As discussed in our first effective educator traits article, student/teacher relationships can be strengthened by familiarity. The better instructors know their students, the more effectively they can personalize student learning. The more information teachers gather about students’ prior knowledge, interests, abilities, goals, home life, etc., the easier it becomes to create individualized plans. Generally, teachers can personalize or differentiate learning in at least four ways: content, process, product, and learning environment. They can change what students are learning, how they are learning it, what they create or turn in, and what surrounds them as they learn. While it is more difficult to control a student’s physical learning environment in online instruction, the other three variables are easier to manipulate. By using individual or group customization in areas like content, learning style, and settings, instructors can better meet students’ individual needs.

Crystal O. Wong, EdD, gives more information about differentiation, stressing the importance of “voice and choice” in student learning in her Faculty Focus article entitled, Building Relationships: How to Connect from a Distance. Wong says it is important that “...students can choose topics that are interesting and culturally or professionally relevant to them, can demonstrate their learning in different ways (e.g., a paper, video/visual presentation, or podcast), can choose their readings within a topic or theme, and can give input on the assessment criteria...By giving voice and choice, we tap into students’ emotions—confidence, enthusiasm, satisfaction—to improve student learning.”

As mentioned in our SchoolsPLP Effective Educator article Part 2, a common pitfall encountered in online learning is the idea that online students can learn self-sufficiently without the need for teacher support. This idea of “sink or swim'' does a disservice to both teachers and students. To improve efficiency, teachers should also use data to drive instruction. Paying attention to dashboard data and customized reports inside SchoolsPLP is an effective way to determine if instruction is successful or needs refinement. Informative dashboard tools, such as the daily activity tab provide real-time feedback on student productivity and the latest activity feed informs teachers when students are struggling or excelling. Also, when teachers monitor student pace, they will notice students who move through a course too slowly and require reteaching, intervention, or end-date extensions, as well as students who move too quickly and may need additional content or more challenging assignments. Having the ability to access a variety of instructional designs for the same course inside SchoolsPLP is a game-changer for many teachers. In traditional online learning options, if one learning style is not effective for a student there usually isn’t another choice. Also being able to access intervention or extension activities inside the SchoolsPLP content library and using the Learning Plan to easily “hide” or “show” activities is a relief for teachers who have struggled in the past to fulfill their students’ unique learning needs. In addition to the tools themselves, teachers can also adjust settings in a course. Some of the most common settings that can easily be individualized inside SchoolsPLP are mastery rates, attempt limits, gating, completion triggers, release dates, review settings, and auto zeros.

Utilizing formative assessments is another way to create personalized learning paths. SchoolsPLP offers mastery-based, credit recovery, and intervention courses that utilize formative assessments to assign only content to students that they do not master. Intervention courses also utilize remediation assessments as unit post tests to automatically allow retries on activities where students continue to struggle. In these instructional designs, it is important for students to understand their knowledge and effort is tied to the amount of work they are assigned and reassigned. This understanding allows students – not just teachers – to play a role in their personalized paths.

It is also a responsibility of effective educators to pay attention to and adjust curriculum and settings to meet their students' IEP or 504 plan accommodations or modifications. This article from Southeastern Oklahoma University, entitled, Special Education and Online Learning, points out that digital curriculum and devices offer a variety of built-in tools. “Digital devices help students and teachers automatically adapt content to preferred delivery styles, be it written, read aloud, visual or a combination. Students can slow down, pause and rewind recorded lectures to absorb subject matter at a pace that works for them.” Teachers can leverage the tools offered in digital curriculum in general and SchoolsPLP specifically to personalize learning and provide scaffolding for all students, with accommodations such as removing test timers or reducing the number of possible answer choices to settings adjustments, grouping tools, customizable grading scales, and much more.

As a real world example, during my student teaching, one of the sophomore students I worked with, Marcela, lived with a severe vision impairment. She required special technology and textbooks to be able to read and interact with the learning material. She joined the class in the middle of the semester so the school did not yet have the technology she needed. I spent a good deal of time working with her one-on-one. Even with my assistance reading the Herman Melville novella, Billy Budd, Sailor, aloud, I was unsure if she was learning. She appeared introverted and rarely spoke up or asked questions. She would respond when prompted and would complete tasks when asked, but she did not participate in class discussions or work independently. That all changed when her assistive device and textbook arrived! Almost overnight, she became a star pupil! She still took her time to read and process her thoughts and she spoke in an almost inaudible whisper, but I would often see her leaning over her device while using her finger to excitedly search for information. She was finally able to participate with the rest of the class and feel successful!

To state the moral explicitly, a student who otherwise had an undeniable learning disability only needed the correct accommodations to thrive. If Marcela's educational supporters had not had the time, resources, or knowledge to determine what she needed, what hope would she have had to succeed? While this is an extreme case of an obvious disability, the premise is no different for other students, even those living without disability. If our online students are not successful at first, what matters most is that we keep trying until we find the right learning style and accommodations to help them learn. That is the pure essence of teaching, without any technical terms or psychology – find out what works for each student, and keep doing that!

With all the effort that is put into monitoring and personalizing students’ learning, the question becomes: “How does one person do all that while motivating their students to learn?” A realistic answer is “it takes a village.” If possible, it is best to rely on several people to support students in their virtual learning, as there are many roles that staff members may play in the online classroom, and most students benefit from as much support as they can get. Whether an administrator, a teacher, a grader, a mentor, part of the IT team, an observer, or a parent, each role can assist students in important ways, like expanding on content knowledge, giving specific feedback or encouragement, modeling expectations, or even showing empathy. However, be aware there can also be “too much of a good thing.” It is possible to confuse students and staff if everyone’s roles and responsibilities are not clearly defined from the start.

One solution is to designate specific roles for each person on the team. For example, if a student has questions about technical issues such as logging in or how to submit an assignment, they might need IT assistance instead of a teacher. Alternatively, if the student has a specific question about course material, they may need a content expert. However if the student has a question about a lesson’s score, they may need to consult a grader. SchoolsPLP offers a number of roles that can help to label staff member responsibilities to help with effective communication and expectations, including teacher, teacher/author, instructor, viewer, grader, observer, registrar, and admin. Though these are the technical labels inside SchoolsPLP, school staff should not feel constrained by these labels, but instead feel free to experiment and adapt them. A good example is the frequently used “mentor” role. Some schools assign mentors the role of viewer inside SchoolsPLP while other schools prefer mentors to be registrars with rights to add students and course sections.

Assigning staff mentor roles is an effective solution to keep responsibilities clearly defined. It may be a mentor’s responsibility to try and keep students engaged with frequent check-ins to build relationships and show empathy. A mentor-type role can also relieve teachers to focus on more content-related questions. In the article, Mentoring Online about Mentoring: Possibilities and Practice, Catherine Sinclaire, at Taylor & Francis Online, points out that a move to digital learning can be associated with “the impersonal interaction between human and machine,” in a sense supplanting the teacher with a computer. In order to retain the social and emotional portion of learning, “professional practice and mentoring suggest the benefit of utilizing technology as a support and enhancement to direct personal interaction, not replace it.” This emphasizes the importance of clearly defining roles for staff who are expected to use technology, like regular chat messaging and videoconferencing with our online students.

Though digital learning is not a new concept, it is more ubiquitous than ever before in the modern educational world. While it does introduce significant and unavoidable challenges, it also presents unlimited opportunity to disrupt and change education, long term and for the better. Similarly, the importance of varying the role of the instructor in the traditional, brick and mortar classroom is well-researched. This lengthy but powerful quote from the article, Redefining the Role of the Teacher: It’s a Multifaceted Profession, written by Judith Taack Lanier at Edutopia, summarizes our current era well: “Instruction doesn't consist primarily of lecturing to students who sit in rows at desks, dutifully listening and recording what they hear, but, rather, offers every child a rich, rewarding, and unique learning experience. The educational environment isn't confined to the classroom but, instead, extends into the home and the community and around the world. Information isn't bound primarily in books; it's available everywhere in bits and bytes.”

Effective online instruction, just like effective classroom instruction, is a multifaceted process that involves the dedicated participation of all stakeholders: administration, teachers, support staff, students, and parents. Just like textbook content can have an undeniable influence on the traditional classroom, the content used in online instruction is equally important; however, course content in any environment is still only a tool. Effective educators do not expect their tools to do their entire job for them; just as a contractor would not drop off their tool belt to build a house. While the task to educate and motivate students in our online classrooms may at times feel impossible, being successful means evolving past traditional classroom roles and working together as a unified learning community.

Watch the video: Personalization & Our Roles as Educators.
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