Snapshot
Type of Interaction: Faculty-student, Asynchronous
Type of Course: Online
Many contemporary college students face challenges in balancing work, family, and academic commitments. The online and hybrid learning environment can make high-quality academic courses accessible to these students, and allow flexibility to access classes as their schedules permit.
But how academically successful are online and hybrid students? The literature indicates that online students can just as successfully demonstrate mastery of course learning objectives as face-to-face students; however, course design and instruction, including the qualities of faculty presence and faculty-student interaction, are key factors to student success in the online learning environment.
The importance of faculty-student interaction to online student success is widely established. A read-across of the literature on student success in online courses points to the importance of faculty presence to student success. In addition, nationally and state-recognized benchmarking tools for quality online course design, as well as Texas State’s own benchmarking tool, the Best Practices Checklist, include student-instructor interaction as a fundamental quality measure for online and hybrid courses. These nationally-recognized benchmarking tools include the Quality Matters Rubric and the OLC OSCQR Course Design Review Scorecard, while THECB’s Principles of Good Practice for Distance Education is a statewide tool. Also important is SACSCOC’s Best Practices for Electronically Offered Degree and Certificate Programs, which stresses the importance of faculty/student interaction.
Why is faculty presence in the online learning environment important, and how can it be established?
Faculty presence is important in the online learning environment in part because, like face-to-face students, online students need to know their instructor cares about their success. That faculty presence and sense of care for students can be built into online and hybrid courses through some readily apparent design and instructional elements. These design elements include course and syllabi introductory videos, as well as often-used tools for faculty/student interaction, such as announcements, video conferences, messages, discussion forums, and emails. As the course progresses, the online instructor enhances faculty presence by providing substantive feedback on graded assessments, making specific interventions by e-mail or other communication with students who are at risk of failing, and communicating with students about key concepts and timelines in the course. These ongoing design and instructional elements can of course be time-intensive, and more or less scalable and feasible depending on the size of the course cohort.
The course design can enhance faculty presence.
Given the natural capacity limitations of the more direct methods of faculty-student interaction indicated above, deliberate course design in which faculty voice is built into the course material can further enhance faculty presence in the course and thus support student success, with the added benefit of not requiring as much of the instructor’s time and active daily engagement. Some ways faculty voice can be apparent in the developed course are the following: Content can be chunked into segments that all have a conversational tone reflective of the instructor’s own voice, including
- short written material,
- videos,
- slide shows, and
- podcasts.
Student assessments can also be instruments of student/instructor interaction.
In addition, faculty presence to support student success can be built into the course assessments, through both self-assessments and graded assessments. Self-assessments can be repeatable exercises with randomized questions, for which students receive customized, substantive feedback. These “smart” self-assessments take time to set up, but once established, they can be automatic, hands-off (for the instructor), yet meaningful student-instructor interactions. Graded assessments provide an opportunity for enhanced student/instructor interaction as well. An idea for at least some of the graded assessments in a course is to design them using the same method that good K-12 instructors use, namely by teaching the material, assessing mastery of the concepts, re-teaching concepts to students who did not master them, and then re-assessing.
In the online learning environment, this kind of assessment involves teaching the concepts through chunking of material, as indicated above, and then implementing a short assessment such as a quiz over the concepts and allowing students who master the quiz to go on. Students who do not master the quiz can receive built-in feedback, then go back through the material, re-take the quiz (with different randomized questions from a question bank), and eventually master the quiz. Again, setting up this kind of assessment can take significant time and thought in the course design and development stages, but can ultimately result in greater student success and less faculty time investment during the course’s implementation and instruction.
Conclusion
With smart course design and engaged faculty, students will know their instructor cares about their success and will ultimately be more likely to be successful in the course. As a next step, faculty can consider reviewing faculty-student interaction in their own online or hybrid course, through a self-review or peer review using one of the benchmarking tools mentioned above, or by visiting with an Instructional Designer from the Office of Distance and Extended Learning.
Another factor to support student success is the student support system, which is covered in Part 2.