As I speak with students, I hear the same thing over and over. Students are panicked that they will not complete the semester successfully. They are distracted by the pandemic, their family responsibilities, financial concerns, and many other weights on their shoulders. At the same time, they may find their online classes do not provide enough pull to keep them motivated and engaged. Without the social pressure to show up to class prepared, students can find themselves checking out to focus on other priorities, even though they want to succeed in their courses. I have seen some surprising behavior from responsible, smart students…not submitting work, not logging into the course, submitting work that is below their usual standard. I know it’s not anything essential about these students. So, what’s going on, and how can we help?
We know from the research that in the best of times, students who have willingly chosen to take a course online can struggle to stay engaged and persist to the end of the semester. Online students have lower retention rates (Fetzner, 2013) and fail courses at a higher rate than students in face-to-face courses (Schroeder-Moreno, 2010). In our current situation, we should expect things to be challenging, for ourselves and for our students.
Teachers can do many small things to help their students stay calm and productive.
One thing that helps students is to share your expectations early and often with students. For each assignment, students may need more detailed instruction than you would expect, since they are processing technological challenges as well as academic challenges with each assignment, all while operating with a brain overwhelmed and impeded by stress and worry.
They may need more reminders than usual about upcoming deadlines. Share your grading rubric and a model example of student work before students complete an assignment to ease their worries and help them focus on your assignment rather than their emotions.
Send a weekly announcement or video to help students navigate the course, explaining what is expected of them that week, showing them where things can be found, how to upload assignments, where they can see your feedback on work, and whatever else they need to know to be successful.
But hold on, many of us are new to this. We may not know where to access things within Blackboard any better than our students, so how are we supposed to guide them in navigating our course? My best advice is to keep things simple and intuitive. Have the same weekly deadlines (days and times) for assignments. Create a folder for each unit or week and put everything students need to access in that folder. But also, Blackboard has many, many training videos. So don’t try to create everything from scratch. Look up these official tutorials on the internet and share the link with your students in an announcement or within the folder for that week. Here is the link to the general site: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Watch_Videos
Be empathetic and flexible with your students. Just as we need understanding and generosity as we are thrown into online teaching (some of us, kicking and screaming), our students need it too. Preparing students for the rigors of the work world by setting strict standards is part of our job as teachers, but this may not be the best moment to prioritize that value over all others. Research has shown that students in online classes often become discouraged when they receive a zero on a high-stakes assignment and that feeling of futility may stop them from turning in future work (Wyre, 2019). Try to be flexible with deadlines, keeping your eye on the prize: student learning and the quality of their work. Similarly, consider allowing students to ‘re-do’ assignments on which they received a poor grade, correcting their mistakes and demonstrating their understanding for a new grade or an average of the two grades. Rigor and responsibility matter to all of us as teachers, but this can take different forms besides timeliness. I think it is worth reconsidering which of our many values should receive priority in this moment.
We want our students to learn and grow, to improve their skills and comprehension of our course material. We want to reach our students, and right now many of them need a gentle hand and clear, frequent communication. Let’s communicate our expectations and guidance to our students, and let’s communicate our empathy and reasonableness.
