In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, many universities around the world are having to switch to online teaching and remote learning at scale and at speed. As they rush to adapt classes to be taught online - often for the first time – the challenges are real and significant. A wealth of digital resources exist that can support this sudden shift to online but knowing what ‘good’ online learning looks like has never been easy, now more than ever. In this blog, we share five lessons we’ve learned from working with universities about what worked for them, and what sometimes surprised them about student engagement.
In 2019, SAGE Campus brought together a group of universities to trial some of our online data science courses. During the trial, we watched closely as the faculty teams implemented and evaluated their chosen course with their groups of learners – each taking their own, unique approach. Then, using a combination of surveys, phone interviews and a face-to-face workshop, we dug into their experiences, highlights and challenges to learn as much as we could about how online courses are used in situ to support a variety of teaching and learning outcomes.
Here are five of our key findings:
1. Satisfaction can be as important as completion
We know that completing every piece of reading, task and activity in any type of course – online or face to face – is rare. And, as it turns out, faculty members agreed and cared more about student satisfaction than completion rates. While course completion in our trial was high (in the University of Mannheim trial, 74% of learners completed all modules of the course - with 65% completing every single module and activity), we found that satisfaction doesn’t require completion; other factors come into play.
What interested faculty more was how satisfied learners were after finishing a course (over 70% of learners rated the courses as ‘good or very good’) and whether they would recommend the courses (over 70% of learners said they would). Crucially, even if completion hovers around the 60% mark, satisfaction was high.
2. Good formative assessments for practice matter more than summative tools
We tried to park our expectations before we launched our trials about what learners would tell us they wanted more or less of, but one thing we were expecting to be told was that faculty would want more end-of-course assessments and deeper knowledge evaluation tools from their SAGE online courses. But, when we dug into this, it became clear that our expectation was incorrect.
What faculty really wanted were good, formative activities that allow for practice, practice and more practice. When it came to summative tests and activities for application, faculty preferred to create and tailor their own.
3. Customization is not as important as quality content and learner experience
The path to successful customization of ‘off-the-shelf’ online courses is a long and winding one, often littered with frustrations. Ultimately, it’s time consuming, costly and complicated - and not everyone will get what they want or expect.
Luckily, we found that customization was not high on the list of important features for faculty. Instead, faculty fed back that having a broad range of examples, case studies and data sets across disciplines was preferred, so they could customize themselves. Quality of content and ease of learner experience mattered more.
4. Faculty and student learners approach the same courses with different motivations
Motivation for taking a course is an important factor for engagement and we saw this play out in two main ways:
Students who took the courses told us they were initially looking for a general overview of the subject area and for ‘reasons why’ the topic or tools mattered and could help them, so wanted to work through the course sequentially. They then would revisit the course later when they had a specific task to do.
Faculty wanted more pointed guidance on how the course could help them with specific research goals and tasks. They wanted to dip into the course, find the specific bit they needed, and dip out again.
Overall, the vast majority of both faculty and students were motivated to take the SAGE Campus courses, despite coming at them from a different angle. Only 12% reported feeling unmotivated while over 63% of learners reported feeling motivated or highly motivated.
5. Using online courses as pre-reading led to better engagement in class
One challenge we often hear from universities is that teaching research methods to classes of mixed abilities (whether online or face to face) is tricky – particularly interdisciplinary groups. Faculty don’t have enough class hours to get the beginners up to speed with the basics, and when it comes to online courses having quality preparatory material is absolutely key. While pre-reading may not be a luxury we have right now while we pivot to online teaching at pace, as we head into the new academic year it’s worth some reflection.
This was the challenge for the International Program in Survey and Data Science (IPSDS), offered through the University of Mannheim and the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, taught fully online. The IPSDS is taught using the R programming language, but some of their interdisciplinary students had no prior programming knowledge, while others were apt at R. They set students our Introduction to R for Social Scientists online course ahead of attending their classes, to ensure all students had the required skills ready for day one of teaching.
Dr. Florian Keusch, Professor of Statistics and Methodology at the University of Mannheim, noted that setting the course as preparatory material improved outcomes of the IPSDS; “I have heard both from our students and the IPSDS faculty that the transition into working with data and actual use cases was much faster this summer than in the past”.
Working with these universities in our trial was an educational experience for the team at SAGE Campus and we thank the faculty, students and university administrators for making it such a success. We hope these insights are useful for other institutions as they switch to online teaching during this difficult time.
Need help teaching online? Check out our 16 Answers To Your Questions About Teaching Online blog from SAGE.
If you’re interested supplementing your online teaching with a SAGE Campus course, please get in touch. We have ten online courses data science courses for social scientists available, and you can try a free module of each today at our demo hub.