Issues and Challenges for Teaching Successful Online Courses in Higher Education a Literature Review

Well-planned online learning experiences are meaningfully dissimilar from courses offered online in response to a crisis or disaster. Colleges and universities working to maintain instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic should understand those differences when evaluating this emergency remote education.

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Due to the threat of COVID-19, colleges and universities are facing decisions about how to continue education and learning while keeping their faculty, staff, and students safety from a public health emergency that is moving fast and not well understood. Many institutions accept opted to cancel all contiguous classes, including labs and other learning experiences, and accept mandated that faculty motility their courses online to help forbid the spread of the virus that causes COVID-xix. The list of institutions of higher education making this conclusion has been growing each solar day. Institutions of all sizes and types—state colleges and universities, Ivy League institutions, community colleges, and others—are moving their classes online.¹ Bryan Alexander has curated the status of hundreds of institutions.²

Moving instruction online can enable the flexibility of education and learning anywhere, anytime, but the speed with which this move to online instruction is expected to happen is unprecedented and staggering. Although campus support personnel and teams are usually available to assistance kinesthesia members learn about and implement online learning, these teams typically support a small puddle of kinesthesia interested in teaching online. In the present state of affairs, these individuals and teams volition not be able to offer the aforementioned level of support to all faculty in such a narrow preparation window. Kinesthesia might feel like instructional MacGyvers, having to improvise quick solutions in less-than-ideal circumstances. No affair how clever a solution might be—and some very clever solutions are emerging—many instructors will understandably find this process stressful.

The temptation to compare online learning to face-to-face instruction in these circumstances will be great. In fact, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Educational activity has already called for a "grand experiment" doing exactly that.³ This is a highly problematic proffer, nevertheless. Kickoff and foremost, the politics of any such debate must be acknowledged. "Online learning" will go a politicized term that can take on whatsoever number of meanings depending on the argument someone wants to advance. In talking well-nigh lessons learned when institutions moved classes online during a shutdown in South Africa, Laura Czerniewicz starts with this very lesson and what happened effectually the construct of "blended learning" at the time.⁴ The idea of blended learning was fatigued into political agendas without paying sufficient attention to the fact that institutions would make different decisions and invest differently, resulting in widely varying solutions and results from one institution to another. With some of that retrospect equally wisdom, we seek to advance some careful distinctions that we hope tin can inform the evaluations and reflections that will surely result from this mass move past colleges and universities.

Online learning carries a stigma of being lower quality than contiguous learning, despite research showing otherwise. These hurried moves online by and then many institutions at once could seal the perception of online learning as a weak option, when in truth nobody making the transition to online didactics nether these circumstances will truly exist designing to take full reward of the affordances and possibilities of the online format.

Researchers in educational technology, specifically in the subdiscipline of online and distance learning, take carefully divers terms over the years to distinguish between the highly variable blueprint solutions that have been developed and implemented: altitude learning, distributed learning, blended learning, online learning, mobile learning, and others. However an understanding of the important differences has mostly not diffused beyond the insular world of educational engineering and instructional design researchers and professionals. Here, we desire to offer an important give-and-take effectually the terminology and formally propose a specific term for the type of teaching being delivered in these pressing circumstances: emergency remote education.

Many active members of the academic customs, including some of us, accept been hotly debating the terminology in social media, and "emergency remote teaching" has emerged as a common alternative term used past online educational activity researchers and professional practitioners to draw a clear contrast with what many of us know as high-quality online education. Some readers may take effect with the use of the term "teaching" over choices such as "learning" or "instruction." Rather than debating all of the details of those concepts, nosotros selected "pedagogy" because of its uncomplicated definitions—"the act, exercise, or profession of a teacher"⁵ and "the concerted sharing of knowledge and feel,"⁶—along with the fact that the first tasks undertaken during emergency changes in delivery way are those of a teacher/instructor/professor.

Effective Online Educational activity

Online education, including online teaching and learning, has been studied for decades. Numerous inquiry studies, theories, models, standards, and evaluation criteria focus on quality online learning, online education, and online course design. What nosotros know from research is that effective online learning results from careful instructional pattern and planning, using a systematic model for design and development.⁷ The blueprint procedure and the careful consideration of dissimilar design decisions accept an bear on on the quality of the instruction. And information technology is this careful design procedure that volition be absent in most cases in these emergency shifts.

One of the most comprehensive summaries of enquiry on online learning comes from the book Learning Online: What Enquiry Tells Us well-nigh Whether, When and How.⁸ The authors place nine dimensions, each of which has numerous options, highlighting the complexity of the blueprint and decision-making process. The ix dimensions are modality, pacing, student-teacher ratio, pedagogy, instructor role online, educatee part online, online communication synchrony, role of online assessments, and source of feedback (see "Online learning design options").

Online learning design options (moderating variables)

• Modality

  • Fully online

  • Blended (over 50% online)

  • Blended (25–50% online)

  • Web-enabled F2F

  Pacing

  • Self-paced (open entry, open up exit)

  • Course-paced

  • Grade-paced with some self-paced

  Student-Teacher Ratio

  • < 35 to ane

  • 36–99 to i

  • 100–999 to 1

  • > 1,000 to 1

  Educational activity

  • Expository

  • Practice

  • Exploratory

  • Collaborative

  Part of Online Assessments

  • Determine if student is ready for new content

  • Tell system how to support the educatee (adaptive pedagogy)

  • Provide student or teacher with information about learning state

  • Input to grade

  • Identify students at risk of failure

• Instructor Function Online

  • Agile didactics online

  • Minor presence online

  • None

  Student Role Online

  • Heed or read

  • Consummate problems or answer questions

  • Explore simulation and resources

  • Collaborate with peers

  Online Communication Synchrony

  • Asynchronous just

  • Synchronous only

  • Some blend of both

  Source of Feedback

  • Automated

  • Teacher

  • Peers

Inside each of these dimensions, there are options. Complicating matters, not all of the options are equally effective. For case, decisions around class size volition greatly constrain what strategies you tin can employ. Practice and feedback, for example, are well established in the literature, but it'south harder to implement this every bit class size grows, eventually reaching a indicate where it'south just not possible for an teacher to provide quality feedback. In the case of synchrony, what you choose will really depend on your learners' characteristics and what best meets their needs (adult learners require more than flexibility, so asynchronous is usually all-time, peradventure with optional synchronous sessions, whereas younger learners benefit from the construction of required synchronous sessions).

Enquiry on types of interaction—which includes pupil–content, educatee–student, and student–teacher—is i of the more robust bodies of enquiry in online learning. In short, it shows that the presence of each of these types of interaction, when meaningfully integrated, increases the learning outcomes.^nine Thus, careful planning for online learning includes not only identifying the content to cover but also carefully tending to how y'all're going to support different types of interactions that are of import to the learning procedure. This approach recognizes learning as both a social and a cognitive process, not simply a affair of data transmission.

Those who have built online programs over the years volition attest that effective online learning aims to be a learning customs and supports learners not just instructionally but with co-curricular engagement and other social supports. Consider how much infrastructure exists around face-to-face teaching that supports educatee success: library resources, housing, career services, health services, and and so on. Face-to-face up education isn't successful because lecturing is good. Lectures are one instructional aspect of an overall ecosystem specifically designed to support learners with formal, informal, and social resources. Ultimately, effective online education requires an investment in an ecosystem of learner supports, which take time to identify and build. Relative to other options, unproblematic online content delivery can exist quick and inexpensive, simply confusing that with robust online pedagogy is akin to confusing lectures with the totality of residential education.

Typical planning, preparation, and development fourth dimension for a fully online university course is vi to nine months earlier the course is delivered. Faculty are unremarkably more comfortable education online by the 2nd or third iteration of their online courses. Information technology will be impossible for every faculty member to suddenly become an expert in online teaching and learning in this current state of affairs, in which pb times range from a single solar day to a few weeks. While there are resources to which faculty can plough for assistance, the scale of change currently being required on many campuses will stress the systems that provide those resources and most likely will surpass their capacities. Allow's face up it: many of the online learning experiences that instructors will be able to offer their students volition not be fully featured or necessarily well planned, and there's a high probability for suboptimal implementation. We need to recognize that anybody will be doing the best they can, trying to accept just the essentials with them as they make a mad dash during the emergency. Thus, the distinction is important between the normal, everyday type of effective online education and that which we are doing in a hurry with bare minimum resources and scant time: emergency remote teaching.

Emergency Remote Teaching

In dissimilarity to experiences that are planned from the beginning and designed to be online, emergency remote pedagogy (ERT) is a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate commitment manner due to crisis circumstances. It involves the utilise of fully remote education solutions for didactics or teaching that would otherwise be delivered face-to-face or as composite or hybrid courses and that will render to that format once the crunch or emergency has abated. The main objective in these circumstances is not to re-create a robust educational ecosystem merely rather to provide temporary access to instruction and instructional supports in a fashion that is quick to set upwardly and is reliably available during an emergency or crisis. When we sympathise ERT in this manner, we can start to divorce information technology from "online learning." At that place are many examples of other countries responding to school and university closures in a time of crisis by implementing models such as mobile learning, radio, blended learning, or other solutions that are contextually more viable. For instance, in a study on education's role in fragility and emergency situations, the Inter-Bureau Network for Education in Emergencies examined 4 case studies.¹⁰ 1 of those cases was Afghanistan, where education was disrupted by conflict and violence and schools themselves were targets, sometimes because girls were trying to access education. In order to accept children off the streets and proceed them safe, radio education and DVDs were used to maintain and expand educational access and likewise were aimed at promoting pedagogy for girls.

What becomes credible as we examine examples of educational planning in crises is that these situations crave creative problem solving. We have to be able to think outside standard boxes to generate various possible solutions that assist come across the new needs for our learners and communities. In some cases, it might even help us generate some new solutions to intractable bug, such as the dangers girls faced trying to admission education in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan. Thus, it may be tempting to recall about ERT as a bare-basic approach to standard instruction. In reality, it is a mode of thinking about delivery modes, methods, and media, specifically every bit they map to quickly irresolute needs and limitations in resources, such equally faculty support and grooming.¹¹

In the nowadays situation, the campus support teams that are ordinarily available to help kinesthesia members learn nigh and implement online learning will non be able to offer the aforementioned level of support to all faculty who demand it. Faculty support teams play a critical role in the learning experiences of students by helping kinesthesia members develop contiguous or online learning experiences. Electric current support models might include total-course design support, professional development opportunities, content evolution, learning management system training and support, and multimedia creation in partnership with faculty experts. Kinesthesia who seek support typically take varying levels of digital fluency and are often accustomed to i-on-one back up when experimenting with online tools. The shift to ERT requires that faculty take more command of the course pattern, evolution, and implementation process. With the expectation of rapid development of online teaching and learning events and the large number of faculty in need of support, kinesthesia development and back up teams must find means to come across the institutional need to provide instructional continuity while helping faculty develop skills to work and teach in an online environment. As such, institutions must rethink the style instructional support units do their work, at least during a crisis.

The rapid approach necessary for ERT may diminish the quality of the courses delivered. A full-course development project can accept months when done properly. The need to "just get it online" is in straight contradiction to the time and attempt normally dedicated to developing a quality course. Online courses created in this way should not be mistaken for long-term solutions but accepted as a temporary solution to an immediate problem. Specially concerning is the degree to which the accessibility of learning materials might not exist addressed during ERT. This is but one reason that universal pattern for learning (UDL) should be function of all discussions around instruction and learning. UDL principles focus on the design of learning environments that are flexible, inclusive, and student-centered to ensure that all students tin can access and larn from the course materials, activities, and assignments.¹²

Evaluating Emergency Remote Teaching

Institutions will certainly want to conduct evaluations of their ERT efforts, merely what should they evaluate? First, permit'south consider what non to evaluate. A mutual misconception is that comparing a contiguous course with an online version of the course constitutes a useful evaluation. This type of cess, known as a media comparison study, provides no real value, for at least three reasons:

Get-go, whatsoever medium is simply a way to deliver information, and one medium is non inherently better or worse than any other medium. Second, nosotros need to better understand unlike media and the way people larn with unlike media to pattern effective studies. And, 3rd, at that place are too many confounding variables in even the best media comparison study for the results to be valid and meaningful.¹³

Researchers who conduct media comparison studies are looking at "the whole unique medium and [giving] little thought to each one's attributes and characteristics, to learner needs, or to psychological learning theories."¹⁴

Other approaches to evaluation tin can be useful in this movement to ERT. The success of distance and online learning experiences can exist measured in a variety of ways, depending on how "success" is defined from a given stakeholder's perspective. From the faculty point of view, student learning outcomes would be of principal involvement. Did learners attain the intended cognition, skills, and/or attitudes that were the focus of the instructional experience? Attitudinal outcomes are also possibly of interest, for students and for faculty. For students, issues such as interest, motivation, and appointment are directly connected to learner success and so would exist possible evaluation foci. For faculty, attitudes toward online instruction and all that information technology entails can bear on the perception of success.

Programmatic outcomes such every bit course and programme completion rates, marketplace reach, faculty time investments, impacts on promotion and tenure processes—all of these are relevant issues related to the offering of distance courses and programs. Finally, implementation resources and strategies are possible areas of evaluation inquiry, such as the reliability of selected technological delivery systems, the provision of and access to learner back up systems, support for faculty professional development for online instruction pedagogies and tools, policy and governance issues related to distance programme development, and quality assurance. All of these factors can influence the effectiveness of distance and online learning experiences and tin can serve to inform learning feel design and program evolution and implementation.¹⁵ These recommended areas of evaluation are for well-planned distance or online learning efforts and may not be appropriate in the example of ERT. Evaluating ERT volition require broader questions, peculiarly during initial implementations.

Next, let u.s.a. recommend where you should focus your evaluation related to ERT efforts. The language of the CIPP model volition exist used for construction.^xvi CIPP is an acronym representing context, inputs, process, and products (meet table one).

Table ane. CIPP evaluation terms

Context Evaluations	Input Evaluations	Process Evaluations	Product Evaluations
"Assess needs, problems, assets, and opportunities, as well every bit relevant contextual conditions and dynamics"	"Assess a program's strategy, activeness programme, staffing arrangements, and budget for feasibility and potential price-effectiveness to meet targeted needs and accomplish goals."	"Monitor, document, appraise, and written report on the implementation of plans."	"Place and appraise costs and outcomes—intended and unintended, short term and long term."

In the case of ERT, institutions might want to consider evaluation questions such as the post-obit:

• Given the need to shift to remote instruction, what internal and external resources were necessary in supporting this transition? What aspects of the context (institutional, social, governmental) afflicted the feasibility and effectiveness of the transition? (context)
• How did the university interactions with students, families, personnel, and local and regime stakeholders impact perceived responsiveness to the shift to ERT? (context)
• Was the engineering science infrastructure sufficient to handle the needs of ERT? (input)
• Did the campus support staff take sufficient capacity to handle the needs of ERT? (input)
• Was our ongoing faculty professional development sufficient to enable ERT? How tin nosotros enhance opportunities for immediate and flexible learning demands related to alternative approaches to instruction and learning? (input)
• Where did faculty, students, support personnel, and administrators struggle the most with ERT? How can nosotros adapt our processes to answer to such operational challenges in the future? (process)
• What were the programmatic outcomes of the ERT initiative (i.e., course completion rates, aggregated grade analyses, etc.)? How can challenges related to these outcomes exist addressed in support of the students and faculty impacted by these issues? (product)
• How tin can feedback from learners, faculty, and campus support teams inform ERT needs in the future? (production)

Evaluation of ERT should be more focused on the context, input, and process elements than production (learning). Notation that we are not advocating for no evaluation of whether or not learning occurred, or to what extent it occurred, but merely stressing that the urgency of ERT and all that will take to brand it happen in a short time frame will be the most critical elements to evaluate during this crunch. This is being recognized by some as a few institutions are beginning to announce changing to pass/fail options rather letter grades during ERT.¹⁷

Also, given the continued prove of problems surrounding student evaluations of instruction nether typical higher educational activity experiences, we recommend that the standard, end-of-semester education evaluations definitely not exist counted confronting faculty members engaged in ERT.^eighteen If an establishment's policy mandates that those evaluations exist administered, consider amending the policy, or make certain that the results are clearly qualified with the circumstances of the term or semester.

Terminal Thoughts

Anybody involved in this abrupt migration to online learning must realize that these crises and disasters also create disruptions to educatee, staff, and faculty lives, outside their association with the university. And then all of this piece of work must be done with the understanding that the move to ERT volition likely not be the priority of all those involved. Instructors and administrators are urged to consider that students might not be able to attend to courses immediately. As a effect, asynchronous activities might exist more than reasonable than synchronous ones. Flexibility with deadlines for assignments within courses, form policies, and institutional policies should be considered. For a high-level example, the United states of america Department of Education has relaxed some requirements and policies in the confront of COVID-19.¹⁹

Hopefully the COVID-19 threat volition soon be a memory. When it is, we should not simply return to our teaching and learning practices prior to the virus, forgetting most ERT. There probable will be future public health and safe concerns, and in contempo years, campuses have been closed due to natural disasters such equally wildfires, hurricanes, and the polar vortex.²⁰ Thus, the possible demand for ERT must become part of a faculty fellow member's skill set, too as professional person development programming for any personnel involved in the instructional mission of colleges and universities.

The threat of COVID-19 has presented some unique challenges for institutions of higher education. All parties involved—students, kinesthesia, and staff—are being asked to do extraordinary things regarding course delivery and learning that have non been seen on this scale in the lifetimes of anyone currently involved. Although this situation is stressful, when it is over, institutions volition sally with an opportunity to evaluate how well they were able to implement ERT to maintain continuity of educational activity. It is important to avert the temptation to equate ERT with online learning during those evaluations. With careful planning, officials at every campus can evaluate their efforts, allowing those involved to highlight strengths and identify weaknesses to be meliorate prepared for future needs to implement ERT.

Notes

1. Run into, for instance: "Information for Ohio State University Students, Faculty and Staff," The Ohio State University, Wexner Medical Center; "President Eisgruber Updates University on Next Steps Regarding COVID-xix to Ensure Wellness and Well-Being of the Unabridged Customs," Princeton Academy; and Everett Customs Higher. ↩
2. "Coronavirus and College Instruction Resource," Bryan Alexander blog, March 17, 2020. ↩
3. Jonathan Zimmerman, "Coronavirus and the Great Online-Learning Experiment," Chronicle of Higher Didactics, March 10, 2020. ↩
4. Laura Czerniewicz, "What We Learnt from 'Going Online' during University Shutdowns in South Africa," PhilOnEdTech, March 15, 2020. ↩
5. "Pedagogy," Merriam-Webster. ↩
6. Daniela Peixoto Olo, Leonida Correia, and Maria da Conceição Rego, "The Main Challenges of Higher Education Institutions in the 21st Century: A Focus on Entrepreneurship," in Examining the Office of Entrepreneurial Universities in Regional Evolution, eds. Ana Dias Daniel, Aurora A.C. Teixeira, and Miguel Torres Preto (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2020): i–23. ↩
7. Robert M. Branch and Tonia A. Dousay, "Survey of Instructional Pattern Models," Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT), 2015. ↩
8. Barbara Means, Marianne Bakia, and Robert Murphy,Learning Online: What Research Tells Us about Whether, When and How (New York: Routledge, 2014). ↩
9. Robert M. Bernard, Philip C. Abrami, Eugene Borokhovski, C. Anne Wade, Rana M. Tamim, Michael A. Surkes, and Edward Clement Bethel, "A Meta-Assay of Three Types of Interaction Treatments in Distance Education," Review of Educational Research  79, no. 3 (2009): ane,243–89. ↩
10. Lynn Davies and Denise Bentrovato, "Understanding Educational activity's Function in Fragility; Synthesis of 4 Situational Analyses of Education and Fragility: Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Liberia," International Institute for Educational Planning (2011). ↩
11. For an explanation of method, media, and style in online learning, see J. Thomas Head, Barbara B. Lockee, and Kevin M. Oliver, "Method, Media, and Mode: Clarifying the Give-and-take of Altitude Education Effectiveness,"Quarterly Review of Distance Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2002): 261–68. ↩
12. See "UDL On Campus," ↩
13. Daniel Westward. Surry and David Ensminger, "What's Wrong with Media Comparison Studies?" Educational Engineering science 41, no. iv (July–Baronial 2001). ↩
14. Barbara Lockee, Mike Moore, and John Burton, "Sometime Concerns with New Distance Didactics Enquiry,"EDUCAUSE Quarterly 24, no. 2 (2001): 60–68. ↩
15. Mike Moore, Barbara Lockee, and John Burton, "Measuring Success: Evaluation Strategies for Distance Teaching,"EDUCAUSE Quarterly 25, no. 1 (2002): 20–26. ↩
16. Daniel L. Stufflebeam and Guili Zhang,The CIPP Evaluation Model: How to Evaluate for Improvement and Accountability (New York: Guilford Publications, 2017). ↩
17. For a discussion of institutions moving to laissez passer/fail in response to COVID-19, see Allison Stanger, "Make All Courses Pass/Fail Now," Chronicle of Higher Educational activity, March 19, 2020. ↩
18. For information about issues with educatee evaluation of instruction, come across Shana One thousand. Carpenter, Bister E. Witherby, and Sarah K. Tauber, "On Students'(Mis) judgments of Learning and Instruction Effectiveness,"Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Knowledge, February 12, 2020. ↩
19. "Guidance for Interruptions of Study Related to Coronavirus (COVID-19)," Federal Student Aid, Information for Financial Aid Professionals (IFAP), March 20, 2020. ↩
20. Elin Johnson, "As Fires Rage, More Campuses Close," InsideHigherEd, October 29, 2019; Jenni Fink, "Florida Universities Cancelling Classes, Endmost Campus Ahead of Potential Category 4 Hurricane Dorian," Newsweek, August 29, 2019; and Perry Samson, "The Coronavirus and Class Broadcasts," EDUCAUSE Review, March iii, 2020. ↩

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Charles B. Hodges is a Professor of Instructional Engineering at Georgia Southern University.

Stephanie Moore is an Assistant Professor of Instructional Pattern and Engineering science in the Curry School of Education at the Academy of Virginia.

Barbara B. Lockee is a Professor of Instructional Design and Applied science, and Provost Faculty Fellow, at Virginia Tech.

Torrey Trust is an Associate Professor of Learning Technology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Yard. Aaron Bond is Senior Manager, Professional Development Network and Faculty Digital Fluency at Virginia Tech.

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Source: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning

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