What if I told you that Online Learning Works?

It’s about engagement, not location

What if I told you that online learning has the potential to be better than in-person learning? Or that you could get more out of a virtual experience than in the traditional classroom environment? Now maybe, after going through a trimester or the majority of a semester through online school, you wouldn’t be so convinced. And with headlines flashing and putting the words “online school” and “disengagement” in the same sentence, it’s easy to see why.

We may look back at our own experience with online learning, thinking about how we’re not in the same classroom as our teacher, and the distance in between us that makes it harder to relate to someone so far away and understand the material. Then, there’s the idea of spending all day on digital devices, which many describe as “distractions” and “products impeding on focus”. Yet we are so frustrated with this experience that we forget, Khan Academy is where we went to fully master material because that’s where we were most engaged when we were actually attending school in physical classrooms. YouTube, Google Search, or online course platforms were where we went to find tutorials to learn more about concepts when we were motivated to learn about on our own. That’s where we found topics which we could maybe even dedicate our lives to if we had more time to look into them. Online education can do it better, but it’s about engagement, not location.

Over the summer, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture given by professor Sanjay Sarma from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who introduced me to the concept of mind-wandering. The human attention span doesn’t last forever: “For the first five to ten minutes, the brain is focused”, but “after 10 minutes, the ability to absorb information goes away” and our mind begins to wander. That’s when information is absorbed and we then need to start applying our skills, recalling information, connecting what we just were taught with other concepts we learned before, allowing us to fully understand the material and allow our minds to truly grow from the information we just consumed. So how do you make such a large impact as a teacher within the critical first ten minutes of a lesson?

Well, let’s think about similar questions first. When you’re writing up an English paper, how do you engage your audience? When you’re giving a speech, how do you get the people listening to you convinced that you know what you’re talking about and you’re going to deliver a good speech? It starts with the first impression: the hook that comes within the first sentence of a paper or a speech. It starts from the very beginning, a hook — maybe a provocative statement you throw out there that causes your audience to stop and think — to feel a certain emotion, to be in awe, to be in shock, to be surprised and wanting to learn more.

Engagement in the classroom is no different. I have found from my own experience, the classes I enjoy the most spark my curiosity and get straight to the point at the beginning: for example, there was one class I took where we were all given a challenge problem to think about and discuss with our peers — an interesting problem that involving the application of previous skills we learned or ideas we discussed — which got us motivated (as a class) to work together to figure out the problem. In those experiences, the learning came through experimenting, collaborating, and connecting the pieces together: we did not master the material because we were told straight from the start what the answers were, but because we were engaged and motivated to learn more. Then, after that period of ten minutes, it’s the perfect time to apply the skills you’ve just developed towards several different problems or prompts which allow you to fully master the material.

Online tech tools available to us truly have the ability to enhance learning and improve engagement. Through digital devices, students have the ability to conduct virtual labs that would otherwise take decades, listen to speakers who are unable to visit every school in the country, and practice an endless amount of problems about a subject until they’ve mastered it, all through the art of automation. Tools like Khan Academy have the ability to test us on a variety of different subjects,tell us where our strengths and weaknesses are, attend to our needs through problem generation (which takes seconds), and we’re even able to get rewarded once we’ve mastered something! Gamification, the idea of being rewarded and leveling up, works, as students are able to see that they’re able to solve real problems, that their minds have the power to come up with solutions to problems which took mathematicians centuries to figure out long ago.

Speaking of which, what if teachers could tell students in mathematics: the problem you just solved was actually an engineering challenge that architects around the block were thinking about when constructing the new apartment complex? Or, for science, that what you just worked on was discovered by Isaac Newton when he was twenty-three? Maybe the class lecture about Isaac Newton could be carrying out that exact experiment, seeing the hypotheses students come up with, and understanding how Newton got to formulating his result.

Let’s turn history lessons into discussions. You could start with a quote from a literary work, analyzing its meaning, and then addressing “what does that mean for people in that society if your ruler said that? For people like us — what would you do if you heard that from your ruler?” This allows us to have intellectual conversations about the true decision-makers in history — the human mind Taking time for this intellectual discussion allows us to push back the boundaries that exist from us adjusting as teens or adults to what’s considered “normal” in this world.

Or, you could start with a question regarding morality or ethics, such as: how should a ruler rule? By love or by fear? Through strict control or leniency? What advantages does that bring to you if you were a ruler, and what about if you were a common person? Then, students could then break out into groups and respond as if they are (A) the ruler or (B) a commoner. This activity offers a perfect transition into a comparison of two different (real!) rulers in history. The beginning activity allows for more intellectual discussion about the two rulers as ideas relating to them have already been developed.

So it’s time for us all to think — not about dreading online school and waiting for it to be over — but instead ask yourself, “what can we do to promote engagement in the classroom so we can get the most out of our experience?”