Are We Setting Our Students Up for Failure?: Minimalism, Maximalism, and the Online Instructor

Several times a semester, I get emails from students either thanking me for my teaching and communication methods or griping about my colleagues and me for failing to support them in the online course environment. I do my best to keep my responses to those emails short and sweet -- emphasis on the sweet part -- to avoid conflict with both the student and potentially the administration for saying something completely out of pocket. In my head, I probably have some heated, emotional response to someone that's had the audacity to criticize one or more of my fellow professors for doing their jobs, but what comes out in the email reply is softened, watered-down, and thrice-checked for political correctness and empathy for an often faceless person on the other side of the vast expanses of the internet. Admittedly, the majority of the reason for my gentility is due to my ever-present fear of conflict, but much of it is tempered by the question, "Are we setting our students up for failure?".

I use the word "we" in the general sense to include myself and my colleagues in the same boat as guidance counselors or admissions advisers even though I have no real experience with any position at the college other than my own. I teach English and never pretend to know more about or to be able to do anything more than that for which I have a degree, but it seems to me that there must be something to all of the complaints. That something, I believe, has to begin somewhere.

As anyone with a college degree knows, registering for classes is as time consuming as it is daunting. Without the proper person or group of people to guide one through the process, it is nearly impossible to complete this task, especially right before the first semester. It is my understanding that it is in that crucial point in time that counselors or advisers nudge students in the right direction based on their abilities and desires. The issue, however, often arises when students with limited interpersonal and time-management skills find themselves desiring to take online courses even though they may lack the necessary abilities to succeed in this environment. For myriad reasons, their desire to complete their degree in their jammies far outweighs their ability to understand the challenges they will face and then they end up with me...the minimalist.

Generally speaking, I feel that less is more until more is necessary. In the case of my online classes, I do my best to limit the amount of information in each unit until a problem pops up and then I address each person or group of people with that problem as needed, by providing them with additional information. For an online class, as with most things these days, the additional information is usually a link to a website or a YouTube video -- because, let's face it, anyone can learn anything from watching a YouTube tutorial about it. While that seems to resolve things for that/those student(s) that asked the question, the real concern is for those that haven't asked and simply go without ever knowing. These are the students that will most assuredly fail individual assignments and eventually the whole course.

Believe it or not, there's a fine line between minimalism and maximalism when it comes to online course design. The maximalist instructor will include more information than anyone ever needs to know about a subject and overwhelm the senses with a colorful array of buttons, bells, and whistles that all contain lengthy descriptions, presentations, videos, links, etc. that not only violate every ADA guideline ever written, but distract from the point of the exercise, disguise the unnecessary as essential, and obscure the essential from visibility. Conversely, the minimalist instructor will limit the amount of information to only the most vital and, in so doing, leave the newest of the new students wondering what the heck they've gotten themselves into and how they are supposed to teach themselves based on what little they've been provided.

The scenarios are definitely extreme and I'm sure that many of you out there are teaching somewhere in the middle, but personal experience and student insight leads me to believe that many of us are designing to these extremes. Let me be clear, this will set our students up for failure; they will fail and we will have failed them. We will have failed to set them up for success by under or overwhelming them with information and, ultimately, will have to give them a failing grade. The only way to avoid this is by implementing and enforcing a detailed system of online course review either internally or externally that focuses on engaging learners in the same or a similar way that we interact with them face-to-face. It may mean making virtual office hours mandatory. It may mean additional student engagement surveys. It may even mean extra professional development courses for us to teach us to learn like our students and navigate through our own courses from a different perspective.

In reality, it is all of these things combined...and it is worth it. We, as professors, may not be able to control what happens when a wide-eyed freshman of any age or background enters our college for the first time, sits down with an adviser, and begins to register for courses, but we can do our very best to make sure that, when they make the decision to learn from home in their jammies, they are doing so with confidence and the right tools they need to succeed.