Resisting the Temptation to Make Your Online Course Too Easy
As a parent of three (and soon to be four) teenagers, I am faced with a certain temptation almost every day. I know that if I ask my kids to do anything that smells remotely like a household chore, I will be faced with hurricane-level blowback.
“Can you empty the dishwasher?”
“The floor needs to be swept, if you have time.”
“The laundry pile is starting to get pretty big.”
Somehow, these simple requests and statements are perceived as major human-rights violations. As a parent, I’m tempted to make things so easy for my children that they never have a chance to complain about how hard I’m making their lives.
The problem with this type of thinking is that if they don’t struggle, they won’t learn, grow, or become the kind of people that I ultimately want them to be. The easiest short-term solution is to do the chores myself. In the moment, it is way easier; the long-term solution, though, is to persevere until they learn to do chores independently, preferably without being asked.
Is that too much to ask? After all, I’m not asking them to build the pyramids, just to clean up their room.
As educators, we are faced with a similar temptation when it comes to designing our courses. After all, wouldn’t it be nice if:
- We never got emails from students asking for help or explanations
- We never got complaints about content being too difficult
- All of our students completed their courses
- We could give everyone an “A”
The reality of education, though, is that it has to be hard. Not too hard, but hard enough that students need to be stretched in order to succeed. Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) called this the “zone of proximal development.” The sweet spot is tasks where the difficulty level is just beyond what a learner can do on their own, but that can be accomplished with the support of a skilled instructor.
As every educator knows, though, not every student’s zone of proximal development is the same. What is easy for one student may be nearly impossible for another. How can we ensure that our online pedagogy results in growth for all of our students? How can we make our courses both accessible and robust?
Before we can answer these questions, it is important to acknowledge that while we want all learners to be able to access learning in our courses, just because it has to be accessible does not mean it has to be easy. There still needs to be challenging content so that students learn and grow, but it needs to be presented in a way that all learners can develop.
Remove unnecessary roadblocks
There are ways to make courses more accessible without cheating your students out of the opportunity to learn from challenging content. One key is to remove unnecessary roadblocks so that all of their effort and attention can be put into the subject matter itself.
Here are a few examples of roadblocks that can be removed to make your courses easier to navigate:
- Roadblock: Overly complex language. Use simple, accessible language instead. Avoid trying to prove how smart you are by writing in an unnecessarily difficult way. If the content is complex, deliberately keep your language simple.
- Roadblock: Too many new, unexplained words. Avoid throwing too many new words at them: Define new words, give students a chance to practice them, and help them actually understand what the words mean in context. StudyForge uses hovertool definitions and games to build vocabulary. Glossaries, quizzes, and intentional repetition are other strategies to try.
- Roadblock: Busywork. Be intentional about everything you make your students do. Every lesson, activity, question, quiz, test, project, and research assignment needs to have a specific purpose. Even games and interactives should have a clear educational goal. If anything is just filling up time, it’s busywork and you can probably drop it.
- Roadblock: Cumbersome tech tools. One thing that can tax students’ brains and their patience is having to learn new, complex software or tech tools. If they have to go through multiple steps just to hand in a simple assignment, there is probably an easier way for students to show what they know.
Provide multiple pathways to success
Another key is making sure there is more than one way to succeed in a course. Here are a few ways to do this:
- Vary content where possible. In math or science courses, present the material in different ways. Let students explore a new concept in both a video, an interactive, and a practice question. In English courses, create literature circle units that have a variety of novel choices. Make sure at least one of the books is at an easier reading level and at least one of the books is more advanced. Steer your students who struggle with reading toward the easier novel, and steer your gifted students towards the challenging one.
- Provide choice in major projects. When you are designing a major assessment, such as an essay or an inquiry-based research project, make sure there are a lot of options for students. For essays, let them choose their topic, and be willing to expand or reduce the word-count requirements for students who need it. For research projects, allow students to choose their topic and give them multiple options of how they can show what they know. For example:
- A slideshow presentation
- A short video or documentary
- A research paper with visual aids
- An oral report
- A poster-board or creative display
- A public-service announcement
- A brochure
- Make some of the hard stuff optional. Provide enrichment lessons, practice questions, and activities for students who want to be challenged. Other students can skip them.
There is more than one way for a student to show what they know. Giving choice empowers students and makes it more likely they will fully engage in the learning task.
Be flexible to help when students are stuck
Sometimes, despite our best efforts, students get stuck while they are doing online courses. In these situations, flexibility goes a long way. Of course, we usually want our students to do every lesson and learn everything we have presented in our courses, but if something is killing their momentum, giving them permission to skip something can breathe life back into their learning journey. Here are a few examples of ways you can help a student get unstuck:
- In math or science courses, reduce the number of required practice questions that they are required to do and make other practice questions optional for students who need them or want to do more.
- In humanities courses, reduce the word count requirements for an essay or written assignment.
- Find some lessons that have non-essential content and allow students to skip those.
- Let students explain what they know orally or by some other method instead of having to write it down.
Identify the roadblock and be willing to clear it out of the way.
Goldilocks
At the end of the day, we want to find the “Goldilocks” level of difficulty for our courses:
- Not too hard
- Not too easy
- Just right
If we find that sweet spot, we can still make adaptations for our struggling learners and create enrichment opportunities to launch our gifted learners.
As educators, we cannot in good conscience make our courses so easy that our students will never struggle. They have to struggle. As humans, being challenged — as long as it does not crush us — is a good thing because it helps us to grow beyond our current capacities. Whether it is getting my teenagers to do household chores or my students to do school work, I need to resist the temptation to just say, “Ah, never mind.” Our young people need to be challenged so that they can thrive in adulthood.
We can never guarantee success, but if we find that Goldilocks “just right” sweet spot, we can bring success within reach for all of our students.
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