How are Learners Affected by Online Learning?

This piece looks at some of the pros and cons re learners who have lessons online.

Pros

1. More interaction

As a teacher, you need to adapt to make the learning experience as engaging as possible. In keeping with a learner-centric learning environment, the onus should be on involving the students as much as possible. What are their interests? Their goals/ objectives? And how can they get the most out of the course? These are all useful starting points to begin with. Varying interaction patterns helps stimulate them and give variety instead of sticking to a more classical teaching approach, for example. As a result, this can be more challenging and interesting for participants. Learning should be enjoyable and often thought-provoking. After making progress and through giving praise, a sense of fulfilment will help their self-esteem and can motivate them to work harder, to achieve more, and, perhaps, become more ambitious learners.

2. Learner-centred

Autonomy is empowering and gives independence and more practice to learners, i.e. with student talking time (STT) in class and exposure to the target language (TL) during self-study. By facilitating, teachers do not leave learners to their own devices, but with supervision and monitoring, and carefully utilising teacher-talking-time (TTT) they scaffold and assist, answer questions and give feedback, but often elicit, which can activate the schemata of members of the class probing and activating passive vocabulary, for example, and giving them the tools they need to notice individual mistakes, to understand typical errors made by learners with the same mother tongue (L1), and by demonstrating and task-setting through interpersonal communication using a myriad of techniques, i.e. giving clues through emphasising key words, gesturing, underling, using antonyms, reminding them about examples previously given, and so on, will keep them guessing and ensure they are as involved as can be.

3. Virtual social contact

Young people who work, for example, need social contact and during this crisis have reported feeling depressed and that they’ve been missing out on an important part of their social existence. Drinking coffee or having a catch-up with colleagues may have been taken for granted before now, but, these days, any kind of social contact is really appreciated. In lessons, ice breakers with pairs helps put them in the right mindset (see 5. Online features: breakout rooms) and gives them the opportunity to have a nice chat with a peer about how their week has gone. This works well on a number of levels as it clears the mind and enables them to practice their spoken English while being listened to by the teacher, and, as a secondary aim, to check for accuracy. Merely being in a virtual classroom situation with fellow workers can create a nice atmosphere, with a teacher they trust and enjoy spending time with, they are in a safe learning environment, and they get a sense of having a shared experience with like-minded professionals who are in the same boat.

4. Paperless

This appears on both sides of the spectrum. For many, in a computer age, they are happy to have all their documents saved on their computer, so not in a folder. This probably gives some people the feeling that they work best following this principle, and are perfectly satisfied to have everything stored digitally. This is bound to depend on the person, though, it seems, like with books, that hard copies of handouts are becoming phased out or are sadly becoming more and more scarce as the years go by.

5. Online Features

Break out rooms (if available with the conference software you use) are an enjoyable way to have pair and group work so students can concentrate on an activity without being disturbed by others. The monitoring should be as unobtrusive as possible, i.e. ‘just listening’ is a useful thing for the teacher to write in the chat box, which in itself is an essential tool; this can be for all involved to message each other re corrections, questions, technical problems etc. Sharing screen, for example, is one way to correct a piece of writing using track and trace and can be done in real time, i.e. with a 1-on-1 student. Sharing documents, i.e. handouts and interactive whiteboards, i.e. to draw a timeline for demonstrating the present perfect or putting up the schedule for the lesson can also be handy. Students can also be made presenters and then they can share power points; this is essential when giving presentations during the lesson.

Cons

6. Lack of social contact

For some, it is not the same as meeting in person; there are some students, for example, who refuse to have lessons online for this reason. It could also be a combination of this and being uncomfortable with online lessons; this has been reported once to the author by a middle-aged lady (a Chinese absolute beginner), though this is something of an exception to the rule.

7. Less discipline

This seems to be more of a problem with younger learners. A secondary school teacher complained that students were allowed not to use their webcams and, by way of illustration, in one extraordinary episode, somehow, a child was caught making pancakes during a lesson. It does depend on the rules of the institution, but, nevertheless, it is easier for students to take liberties online and overstep the boundaries. With adults, it could be a case of handing in homework after a deadline or returning from the break too late that would probably not have happened in a classroom situation when the student needs to look the teacher in the eye.

8. Lack of writing

Some learners learn best through writing and adults should know if they fall into this category. If you believe in learner styles, then kinaesthetic learners would fit the bill. The issue is that a lot of young adults can be lazy and try to get away with doing as little as possible. If they do not write anything down, unless they have a photographic memory, which is almost unheard of, then they are more than likely to forget it very quickly. They will find it hard to revise for grammar tests and to refresh between lessons, so this should be addressed at the beginning of a course, i.e. it may be necessary to remind them of the importance of note-taking in the first lesson.

9. Multi-tasking

Usually, doing more than one thing at a time is likely to be a positive achievement. Although, when it comes to online lessons, it is vital that learners concentrate and don’t allow themselves to get distracted by things like emails, social media, phones, other people in the background, pets, and the list goes on. The same applies to distracting other students; though this is something that can be dealt with if push comes to shove. The temptation is there for individuals to act out of turn in the way as educators cannot really see what is happening beyond the field of vision that the webcam picks up. Teachers never really know what their learners are up to in that respect. So, unfortunately, this is largely out of their hands.

10. Paperless

This is not really an issue on this side of the coin as documents should be made available for downloading, which can be printed out and filed away if learners prefer to do so. On the other hand, it does require more effort on the part of the learner, as they are not being given everything in paper format, so if they’d rather keep a nice, well-organised folder storing all the handouts with dividers, for example, they will have to go that extra mile to make it happen.