What Makes a Course Resilient?

Like universities all across the country, mine announced, mid-semester in the spring of 2020, that we’d all be transitioning to online learning in less than a week. This was obviously stressful for instructors and students alike. At the time, it was all most of us could do to keep our heads above water. But I soon noticed that some courses — at my university and others — seemed to weather this storm with far less disruption to the student experience than others. Some changed very little. My curiosity was piqued, and with some colleagues and a team of undergraduate students, I spent the summer of 2020 investigating what it means for a course to be “resilient,” and how we can plan for such resilience in the course design process. Here are some of the key takeaways from our research and experience.

Educational technologies are no silver bullet when it comes to designing resilient courses. Online courses can be cumbersome for users, impersonal, and often result in worse learning outcomes for students involved. But harnessing technology is crucial for the instructor designing for resilience, accessibility, or scale.

The key to doing so effectively, as Richard E. Mayer lays out in Multimedia Learning is to start by making sure that your design process is “learner-centered” rather than “technology-centered”. That your goals for student learning drive the design process, rather than a desire to incorporate any number of potentially useful technological tools or platforms. Building on Mayer’s work, we’ve found that the best strategic use of technology in course design is to eliminate or reduce what he calls “extraneous processing.” 

Practically, this means minimizing the number of digital platforms that are used in your course. In modifying my course for the fall, I was tempted to use separate communication tools for weekly messaging, in-class activities, and weekly discussion assignments. Considered individually, each provided features that I felt could enhance students’ learning experience. But in the end, I feared any small potential gains from using all three would be swamped by the cognitive processing required to log into, and learn, each of these three separate platforms.

Similarly, the most effective courses I’ve come across (online or in-person) use a single updatable, web-based platform to present all course content and material. The course I most often teach simply uses a public-facing website. When students know that all of the information they’ll need to succeed in the course is contained in one place, they are free to spend more time processing course content than finding it.

It’s also important to resist the temptation to build redundancy into your presentation of, or communication about, course materials. While it might seem like you’re doing students a favor by posting assignments on an LMS, linking to them via a website, and sending them out as a PDF by email, the profusion of information significantly increases both the cognitive load and student anxiety about potentially missing important information. For this reason, one of the best ways to increase course resilience is by creating a single, reliable channel of communication, and then using that channel consistently. 

Finally, when it comes to communication, it’s important to remember how crucial relationships are in facilitating learning. Students are more engaged and motivated when they feel like they are personally connected with their instructor and other students in the course. Because this is true of both in-person and online courses, there are a number of ways in which you can utilize this principle in designing your course for greater resilience.

This fall, when it was unclear what the ratio of in-person to distance learning would be, our teaching team decided that we would try to present as much student feedback as possible in the context of a personal conversation. This meant reducing the overall grading we asked of our TAs, who usually provide a mixture of in-person and written feedback, to free them up to meet with students multiple times over the course of the semester. Our course also employs undergraduate student leaders who convene weekly dialogues. They, too, were asked to meet twice with each of their students individually to talk through goals they brought to the course, and then check in on progress they were making with respect to those goals. Each professor leading a section held additional office hours. We tried to get creative about how students could connect with us, encouraging them to make an appointment to take a socially distanced walk or to call us during designated times. We also included simple personal details in each of our email communications, and added a small headshot to our email signatures.

The good news about resilient course design is that the principles for resilient courses increase effectiveness no matter the mode of instruction. A well-designed course that strategically incorporates educational technologies is going to have better outcomes whether it’s taught entirely online, in-person, or some hybrid of two. Resilience in design is also something that can be done gradually, too. While you might not be ready to totally overhaul your course in the next week, or to start building a new website, it’s easy enough to think a bit harder about honing in on a single mode of communication, or just putting a couple hours of thought into how to create a single access point for course materials. As always, the key is to fit these principles into your teaching practice, and to keep in mind the students who will ultimately benefit.