Covid-19 has resulted in mass layoffs and more time for huge numbers of people. Many have therefore turned to the internet to upskill or even completely reskill by taking informal and more formal online courses. These courses may be MOOCs or paid pre-recorded video courses with or without certificates. In Covid-stricken 2020, Coursera alone increased its revenues by almost 60% to US$293 million, and not long after its IPO in March, it was valued at US$7 billion(1). This boom in online education has encouraged more educators and creators to create their own online courses and share their expertise.
Covid-19 has resulted in mass layoffs and more time for huge numbers of people. Many have therefore turned to the internet to upskill or even completely reskill by taking informal and more formal online courses. These courses may be MOOCs or paid pre-recorded video courses with or without certificates. In Covid-stricken 2020, Coursera alone increased its revenues by almost 60% to US$293 million, and not long after its IPO in March, it was valued at US$7 billion(1). This boom in online education has encouraged more educators and creators to create their own online courses and share their expertise.
So, how can the internet be used most effectively for learning?
The range of online courses is exponentially growing, and they come in all shapes, sizes and professionalism: from 60-second Tik-tok videos to informal Youtube tutorials to more structured courses on Udemy, Thinkific and Skillshare to more professionally produced courses offered by organizations like Google and Amazon to academically formal certificate programs on Coursera and various name-brand universities.
Many course creators are either trained teachers themselves or very tech savvy Youtube “creators”. These “creators” in particular understand the nuances of digital marketing in the new “attention economy”. As for more pedagogically-minded educators, like Sal Khan of the Khan Academy, they usually know more about structured learning and pedagogy but pay less attention to the currency of attention, or they may be weak in knowling how to translate learning practices into technology practices.
As a relatively new medium for learning with vast potential, online educational content is only beginning to scratch the surface of effective online learning.
This article will list some of the best practices for course creation, from both real educators and creators as well as making some suggestions and predictions for future practices. The following evolution map follows not a chronological order but one of effective pedagogy, where pedagogy is defined as the method of helping learners acquire skills.
Online learning v1.0: Creator-designed tutorials- nuggets of value
Sensitive to the tyranny of the perpetual scroll and netizen psychology, the typically talented, young, and enthusiastic Youtube creators leverage content marketing to create useful tutorials for free to establish credibility and promote themselves as a credible and likeable authority. Once the viewer’s interest is piqued and the creator is “liked”, the viewer will follow links to longer and often paid courses and services. These Youtube creators follow the AIDA marketing creed:
- Attention – 3-5 seconds to hook the audience
- Interest – maintain interest with relevant and useful information and knowledge with no fluff!
- Desire – create a desire in the audience to action
- Action – call to action to watch the next video or subscribe to a newsletter or click a link to a more expensive course or coaching session.
Very often, these creators often have a good understanding of the subject-matter and are able to communicate that understanding in a clear and friendly way.
Online learning v2.0: Commercial learning platforms – engaging presentation of skills of value
Several online learning platforms, like Udemy, are commercial in nature and also vie to catch the attention of potential students/customers. In fact, many Youtube creators place their more serious educational offerings in these platforms.
Because these platforms want their listed courses to attract as many students/customers as possible, they offer free courses and tutorials on how to create online courses. Udemy lists steps and advice for new course creators to ensure their courses bring value to learners. For the Introduction section of the course (the first 15 minutes), for example, Udemy advises course creators to
- Introduce yourself and stress your experience and authority in the subject,
- Avoid being sales-y,
- Use 2-4 minutes to persuade the customer by a. Outlining main points in course, b. Saying what skills will be achieved, c. Building your credibility, d. Being fun and engaging, e. Showing yourself in the video to help build a relationship with the customer,
- Set up a “quick win” exercise to make the learner feel they learned and accomplished something.
These learning platforms understand sales psychology and the importance of the initial hook to quickly persuade the customer of the value of the product. But they also recognize the importance of added value and of providing a range of tools for course developers to let learners practice and consolidate learning. Notes, summaries and even quizzes can be uploaded to accompany the video lessons. But this is no guarantee of learning.
Online learning v3.0: Non-profit educational platform – The Khan Academy and skill mastery
Perhaps the most pedagogically and technologically advanced learning platform on the internet today is Sal Khan’s revolutionary Khan Academy. While the lessons are not optimized for the attention economy (they are blackboard writing + audio), the knowledge is presented very clearly and the practice exercises that follow the video lessons are based on sound principles from the science of learning: skill mastery. In this mastery framework, only after a series of practice exercises have been successfully competed can the learner move on to the next level of knowledge.
Since the Khan Academy aims to be the “One World Schoolhouse” (2) and provide high quality education for everyone for free, it is not a commercial platform like Udemy or Coursera. The focus of the pedagogy is therefore not front-loaded to grab the attention of the learner as early as possible (knowledge reception), but rather end-loaded with the goal to provide enough practice to achieve skill mastery.
Is it possible to achieve a more blended front-end + back-end approach: personal attention-grabbing education plus skills mastery efficiency?
Yes – at least based on the principles from the Science of learning, which we will look at in the next section.
Principles for learning from the Science of Learning
The fundamental challenge of any pedagogy, or learning mission, is to push knowledge from short-term to long-term memory. More specifically, this is a two-sided challenge: to first clearly present knowledge to achieve understanding, and then to facilitate the remembering of the knowledge or skill. The second part of the challenge involving memory is often given less attention and is assumed — or hoped — to happen naturally. Ironically, as everyone was a student at some time, we all know that long-term memory is not a natural happening. Teachers who are talented at communicating can get — and sustain — the attention of learners. That is, they can exploit the learners’ working memory to transmit a clear understanding of the subject. With some spaced repetition and some followup testing, this knowledge may enter the short-term memory.
But does this understanding naturally enter into long-term memory? – Not at all.
There are so many variables that mediate the process from short- to long-term memory that it is a real black box. Herein lies the real challenge of learning – how to go from short-term to long-term memory?
We do know that cycles of encoding and consolidation knowledge are necessary. The Science of Learning has identified three general rules of learning:
1. Learning needs memory,
2. It requires continual learning and remembering, and
3. Learning is an acquired skill.
To turn these rules into practices to guide learning, an educational program needs to take advantage of the following strategies:
- Interleaving different subjects (like Biology and English Literature) – to create more brain associations,
- Varied types of practice – to reduce boredom and mind-wandering,
- Spaced practice over time – to repeatedly expose the topic to memory, and
- Retrieval practice (like tests) – to force the learners to actively remember the topic.
Learning intensifiers are also helpful, such as making the learning appear important and relevant to the learner, making it personalized, and making abstract concepts more concrete with analogies, for example. To ensure deep and durable learning, the learning program should consist of even more strategies that require effort on behalf of both learner and instructor:
- Challenging practice,
- Connect new knowledge or old knowledge and put into own words,
- Opportunities for learners to make mistakes, reflect and learn from them,
- Scheduled practice and repeated recall and testing (by instructors and learners themselves),
- Open-ended performance practice is better than closed-ended multiple choice,
- After performance or test feedback.
From these lists of strategies and rules of learning, we can see that most online courses cannot claim to facilitate learning. The practice (if any) is not challenging, there is little need (if any) to commit anything to memory, the retrieval practice (if any) is typically multiple choice and not open ended, there is no scheduled practice nor repeated recall, there is little opportunity (if any) for reflection, there is little feedback (if any) on any incorrect exercises or test questions.
So, if these online courses are not prompting learning, what are they doing? – They are prompting knowledge familiarity.
Even the Khan Academy does not incorporate spaced practice and repeated retrieval … at least not yet. But we must not be so harsh on online pre-recorded courses, because live classroom classes do not fare much better (if at all).
Online learning 4.0: Integrating more technologies with principles from the science of learning
So, what would an online course v4.0, informed by Learning Science principles, look like?
Similar to many front-end focused commercial online courses, online course v4.0 would
- Be presented by a personable and friendly presenter who can be seen
- Clearly communicated in easy to understand language
- Quickly and clearly articulate relevant learning goals and make sure they are delivered
- Deliver a quick win to increase confidence and motivation to continue
- Be clearly and logically structured, from simple to complex, and/or from more general to specific topics
- Focus on useful knowledge of value to not waste any time.
In short, they would focus on grabbing attention at the beginning of the course, and then maintaining attention throughout the rest of the course with short 3-6-minute videos that introduce one main idea at a time.
Similar to more back-end focused online courses, online course v4.0 would
- Provide a learning map to help the learner understand how the different concepts and knowledges relate to and make up the topic
- Take a mastery approach and encourage/force the learner to successfully compete exercises before moving on to the next topic
- Offer feedback clues on incorrect questions
- Monitor progress and communicate that progress to the learner in numbers, points or graphs to increase learner motivation.
Using untapped technologies, online course v4.0 could
- Space the learning and practice over a certain time period to optimize frequency of exposure
- Develop a test bank of questions of varying degrees of difficulty to more accurately gauge the level of mastery
- Use chatbots to give clues and personal help for incorrect responses on exercises or quizzes
- Remember incorrect responses and re-present them across a certain time interval
- Devise exercises for learners to paraphrase the new knowledge in their own words and relate it to their old experiences/knowledge.
There is a bright future for online learning, especially when new technologies can be added to add a time element to lengthen the learning and remembering process and AI assistant chatbots to make the feedback even more personal. The ideal learning situation will be a combination of the automated online course and the real human coach/facilitator – the automated system efficiently taking case of the details and ensuring the repeated behavior of the individual learner, while the human coach/facilitator can offer the hands-on mentoring and apprenticing to give more human and insightful help and feedback.
References
1. Adams, S. (April 1, 2021). Online education provider Coursera is worth $7 billion after going public. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2021/04/01/online-education-provider-coursera-is-worth-7-billion-after-going-public/
2. Koch, V. (March 31, 2021). $COUR Coursera IPO | S1-Breakdown | Koch Fund. Seeking Alpha. https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/50309069-victor-koch/5573558-cour-coursera-ipo-s1-breakdown-koch-fund
3. Khan, S. (2012). The one world schoolhouse: Education reimagined. Twelve.
