7 Tips for Improving Remote Learning in Higher Education

It’s been over a year since COVID-19 forced the transition from traditional to remote learning. This has come with its own advantages and drawbacks that both students and instructors maneuver constantly. The past couple of years have seen a rapid expansion of online education, but there has been recent research too showing that online learning doesn’t generally work as well as face-to-face classes — and that students who are already struggling are likely to be affected the most.

As remote learning grows in practice, the challenge for the instructors remains clear: to design interactive, engaging, motivating and responsive courses. The past year has provided tremendous opportunities to test the waters with remote learning tools and processes. Here are some tips to build on those lessons and improve online learning experience in higher education in Canada:

1. Build a Connection with Students

Instead of jumping right into the lecture, you can use the first few classes to establish rapport with your students. At the end of your course, you can conduct surveys to get feedback on what went well and what didn’t to identify opportunities to improve remote learning. You can then share the results with the students, along with your input. This can be your most unfiltered source of information for improving remote learning.

2. Create a Timetable Suited for Online Learning

Unlike physical settings where the mode of learning is predominantly live lectures, online learning offers students to curate their own timetable to complete their courses. This offers you a wider timeline to teach and your students the flexibility to learn.

Here’s how you can go about it: Analyze your last session’s timetable against course completion, student attendance and student performance. Find out the loopholes where there is scope for improvement. Ask students how they feel they can better leverage your lectures, and then design a timetable that works best for both parties.

3. Help Students Maintain Focus

Concentrating in an online class is tough. Unlike a physical classroom setting, students stay in their usual surrounding when studying from home. The current health crisis has exacerbated this inability to focus. The problem of focus exists on multiple dimensions.

Lacking the structure of a traditional school day, many students find it difficult to concentrate, organize their time, and stay on track. Thus, it become important to provide them with the structure that can help them focus.

Here’s how: Break your curriculum into trackable tasks that serve as weekly milestones. Give clear directions that serve as prompt reminders of activities, assignments, assessments, and due dates. Organize your sessions around shorter sequences and activities (polls, breakout sessions, questions). Pause during a class and ask if students have any questions or pose a question yourself.

4. Create a Sense of Community

The online world is a great platform to bring together individuals from diverse interests and experience and create communities that enrich every participant. You too can instill a sense of community by helping students get to know one another.

Here’s how: Split a large class into smaller units and have the groups participate in icebreaker activities. Skew team assignments more towards the start of your course, so students feel at home talking to each other as they carry on with the session.

5. Identify and Support Struggling Students

In this rapid shift to virtual learning, technology has come to fore, but it is a fallacy to assume all students are on the same page. Every student has their own learning curve - some need academic support, others, technology assistance. Yet a lot more need non-academic support.

What can you do? Monitor their engagement and undertake regular check-ins and checkups. You can reach out proactively whenever you see there are signs that a student is falling behind.

6. Keep Exploring Opportunities to Make your Content Interactive

The online learning tools have taken content interactivity to a new dimension. Quizzes that have immediate results, personalized reviews that let students see real-time the areas they need to focus. Apart from what the tools offer, there are always opportunities to be innovative and create more interactive content. Instructors have really gone the extra mile – some have optimized their schedules to best suit the online model, while others are gamifying their content to make it more interactive.

7. Balance Synchronous and Asynchronous Learning

Online learning can be done either synchronously, where every student is online at the same time, or asynchronously, where students access the same lesson at different times. Synchronous lessons can be harder and do not allow as much time for practice, but it not only allows for prompt teacher feedback, but it also enables teachers and students to maintain connections and feel part of a group—which is more important now than ever.

Learning is a constant process. The best way to ensure that we are evolving with the times is to implement what we have learnt in our past sessions. These learnings are a roadmap to improve online education, now and in the future.