Student perspectives on online learning: DECoP November webinar

On 14th November the Digital Education Community of Practice were excited to host a student panel that sought to highlight our students’ perspectives on learning and studying online. We hosted three student panel members who all study fully online courses. The recording of the webinar, linked at the bottom of the page, is well worth checking out but below we have summarised our highlights.

Key takeaways

Flexibility

One of the key things that came across very clearly from the students was their need for flexibility. It was one of the key reasons they chose to study online as they were all working alongside their study.

As educators, it’s interesting to note how our students are achieving this flexibility. One of them, for example, was negotiating time off work to attend webinars. Not all students are able to negotiate flexibility in other parts of their lives though, so it’s important to consider how we can ensure all students can fully engage with the learning experience.

Webinars

Webinars can be really valuable experiences, but they can be difficult to implement in online settings. One panellist had a particularly difficult time with webinars, experiencing both technical issues and problems with how webinars were conducted. The technical issues will be familiar to many who have engaged in online meetings including connection and audio issues. Other feedback on webinars that is really useful to reflect on included:

• Lecturers trying to run sessions from noisy environments making it difficult to follow what they were saying
• Some students would attend but not engage, this would make breakout room activities unproductive
• Taking attendance took up too much time in sessions

These issues highlight the need for careful planning of online sessions including ways you can adapt activities within sessions based on your students’ needs. It’s also useful to think about how much of our in-person practice we need to recreate online, for example, Teams is able to tell you who attended a session, so taking attendance may not be necessary.

Community

Community building online can be difficult but can be achieved in many ways. Our students had very different experiences of online community with some feeling part of a vibrant community while others did not and felt more isolated. What was interesting to hear was that it wasn’t just synchronous sessions that helped establish community. One of the students noted how the asynchronous elements of a course helped them feel more involved.

Another idea that came up during our conversation was our role in developing and fostering social opportunities for our online students. As students may find it difficult to connect with each other organically it’s worth considering how we can facilitate this throughout our courses.

Final Thoughts

To end the panel, we asked the students what they wanted staff to know about learning online. Their suggestions included:

• It’s really important to get the technology side of the course right and avoid technical issues as much as possible
• Practice assignments are really valuable in helping them prepare for the final assessment
• Being active, engaged and responsive as a teacher in online spaces is really important
• Consider mentor programmes between students at the beginning and the end of the programme
• Make sure your videos are clear and have appropriate audio quality

 

^{Play the recording of the webinar.}

 

Contributors

Alice Coombes, MSc Global Public Health
Demetris Athanasiou, MSc Paediatric Emergency Medicine
Oluwamayowa Bello, MSc Emergency and Resuscitation Medicine