Dr. Gillian Bartlett is a tenured Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at McGill University. She received her PhD in epidemiology from McGill in 2001 and her MSc in 1996. She is currently the Executive Director for the Network Coordinating Office of the Primary and Integrated Health Care Innovations (PIHCI) Network.
1. If you had to summarize how online learning is different from traditional face-to-face classroom learning, how would you do that? Besides the medium itself, what are some key differences between an online learning program and a traditional lecture?
Well, you have to first clarify what is meant by online learning. A lot of universities are about to do something that I call virtual teaching, which means they're replacing the face-to-face classroom experience with the same content material and approach, but with students attending virtually using platforms such as Zoom or Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams.
That's not what I consider online learning. Online learning is when you specifically develop materials that can be consumed online and that can be supplemented with discussion forums and reading materials. I actually think the best online learning occurs in what is called a “blended format”. That means materials that have been put into mediums that are accessible to be consumed via the internet, complemented by face-to-face learning with experts where it's really about engaging and discussion.
A typical in-person learning environment tends to be what we call didactic learning, which is essentially somebody speaking to you. We know that after 20 minutes, the average student retains less than 80% of the material. These long didactic lectures will hopefully be phased out because they're not optimal teaching tools. Online learning provides certain advantages in allowing students to pursue the material at their own pace: to stop, to pause, to go back to review and to supplement that with other videos and other materials.
There are different attributes to it, in terms of whether it's synchronous or asynchronous, whether you're doing cohort enrollment or not, etc. It has a lot of flexibility, it has a lot of advantages and it has to be done using best practices principles which means no super-long videos, things like that.
2. As a professor who works both in the classroom and in the creation of successful online learning programs, how is the preparation different? Do you find that the students' expectations are different?
It actually takes a lot more upfront preparation to do online learning.
I think that students have a lower expectation of online learning so they are actually more appreciative of what you produce. It's an interesting phenomenon - I’ve found with their evaluation of you, they're much more generous in their judgment of you as an instructor online than they are in person. That may be related to how you have to prepare. In a face-to-face classroom, there's a fair amount that you can adlib as you go along and it's really easy to get caught up in conversational rabbit holes or to go off on tangents. The quality of your lecture can be really affected by your current mental state or other commitments you're caught up in - so that any given day, they might have more of your attention or less of your attention. Your teaching quality may depend on the topic, how often you've taught it and also your charisma as a speaker.
So the thing with online learning is that you can't go off on tangents - you prepare your material in advance and everything's got to be sourced, so it tends to improve the quality of what you're presenting. You force yourself to break it down into smaller chunks, so you think “What's the learning objective of that chunk?” It adheres to good teaching practices far more closely if it's done properly and you're not just recording yourself doing what you're doing normally in person.
Students appreciate being able to sit down in their pajamas with a cup of coffee while they’re watching a video, or maybe listening to it. If they get interrupted, they can easily go back. Or if you’re like me and you’re a speed reader - I love having scripts because I'll put the dialogue on double-speed and read along with it. Obviously somebody can't do that in person, right? So online blended learning really allows for a lot of flexibility and if you're somebody who doesn’t have English as your first language, you can just really slow it down and take the time to read the script. There's ways that it’s far more useful for you.
I find the students react better to blended learning. They still want that expert interaction, but when I interact with students that are supplemented by online content, we’re not interacting on substantive content, we're talking about what they've already learned and how they've applied it and where they still have questions.
3. What are the key aspects of online learning that must be included if the program is going to be a success?
You have to use multiple modalities. So reading material and videos, discussion forums and quizzes, things like that. There has to be a clear method of assessment. The materials that are online have to be designed for the online environment which means shorter videos, clear learning objectives and ongoing tracking as to whether people are actually watching the videos and using the materials available. I believe for it to be successful, it has to be complemented by some interaction with the class - the learners with each other and with the experts.
4. Is there a limit on what can successfully be taught online, in your opinion?
I think there are certain things that are a lot more difficult to be taught online and that tends to be more procedural skills. Some of the things that come out of medical school - how to do a knee operation, for example. But I still think almost all subject areas have a certain amount of substantive content like theory or foundational knowledge that they need to convey and I believe all of that can be done successfully in a blended learning format.
I don't believe there's a single topic I teach that I couldn't do in the blended learning format.
5. Can online learning survive or be successful on its own what kind of support does it need in the virtual world and in the real world. I know you've created a training program with mentors, how does that work?
First, you must be aware of bandwidth limitations. We're very privileged in North America in terms of Wi-Fi access, the computers we have available, the graphics, the mic, the camera and that might not always be the case in other settings. We need to be aware that to really participate in virtual learning or online or abundant learning you do need a fairly decent technological setup with a camera and with a good headset.
You also need to support the faculty and the teachers to learn how to do this properly.
As I said before, there's a big difference between virtual teaching and online blended learning and if you have faculty who are already uncomfortable with the idea of virtual teaching and they're not supported to do online learning properly, it's not going to end well. And then also to have sufficient numbers of people moderating discussion and creating that dynamic of interaction. Having activities online ensures that it's more challenging for people just to zone out for months at a time - you need elements where students have to log in and comment and discuss while realizing that there's somebody on the other line looking at that.
The typical form of online learning that most people are familiar with are MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and most people don't like them because there isn't that level of interaction. They have very high enrollment rates and very very low completion rates.
6. How do you build student feedback into an online learning program?
In multiple ways. I tend to create, for every module or question, a discussion thread and I usually assign one of the learners to moderate it and to summarize it and I look to see that people are participating in the discussion threads.
I try to incorporate elements that reflect the material but are a little more personalized like “What was your greatest challenge in doing this?” or “What is something you realized when you researched this?” to make it a little more informal but that allow them to reflect back on what I’m trying to teach. And then also to have sometimes student-led discussions or different things and also quizzes and different evaluations online.
7. Do you have feedback loops set up that will continuously let you improve the learning program?
We do try and build those in. We always do surveys of the participants of what they like, what they didn't like. We’re trying to distinguish the content and the different tools and the learning platform from their experience. So, discerning what was difficult for them to use versus what they're consuming versus their competencies.
8. So, what kind of timeline do you need to create a successful online learning program? What kind of physical resources are needed? What kind of investment and what kind of time?
So for somebody who is starting and hasn't done it before, you're looking at anywhere from six months to a year to prepare a course.
It depends on the resources they have available to them. So, if you're going to do anything online - at a minimum you need a way to record. That is becoming more and more something that people do in their own home, but we had set up a sound-proofed recording room with certain lighting and different things.
So typically, you have a location to record and I like to have a three-member team. This isn’t just for a single course - this would be more for a program. You would have an educational engineer that knows all of this stuff and can talk to the instructors about what they're trying to teach.
You have a videographer, that's something that knows about all the recording and how to get the sound right and everything else and you have a video editor - so this is somebody that can go through help you create scripts, advise you on length of things, on things that were too wordy, and then afterwards can put it all together and chop out all your errors. I like to make it easier for my videographer by swearing when I know I've screwed up - so then you know exactly where to edit! Hah, but I don't know if that's one of the best practices.
So it's usually a three-person team to truly support a small group of faculty trying to put on a program and obviously those numbers then need to increase with complexity. You might need a manager or more video editors or different things as you increase your volume. I have done online learning with my Mac with a Camtasia editing program and just done it myself. It wasn’t my most successful effort - I think that's where I figured out how much having a video editor helps.
It depends on the quality you’re trying to achieve and your timeline - I have developed an international online course within six weeks. You would need to be pretty experienced to get in done in that kind of timeline. Anything under three months and you’re driving yourself crazy for no good reason, so somebody completely new to the process, you probably want to give it a long timeline because they're going to be uncomfortable being recorded, it's going to take them a while to move their material over into an appropriate format that's well sourced and referenced and they'll have to think about how to do evaluations.
So generally, from a year to six months is appropriate. There is quite a bit of initial work, but once you've got that, an online course is easily reusable with only very minor updates for up to three years before it needs an update.
9. Finally, what advice would you give a school faculty or professor who's serious about leveraging the strengths of online learning in their teaching?
I would tell them to get ahold of somebody who’s done it and have a long conversation with them. Don’t under-resource. If you don’t do it well, you will have disappointed learners, you will have disappointed teachers. And it's something that's hard to come back from reputation wise.
And it is a big change - you have to support your faculty. You can't expect them to figure out how to do this and do this well on their own.
So you have to support your teachers and I think you're gonna see over the next little while a lot of people are getting very burnt out with virtual teaching and zoom classrooms, because they're kind of trying to do this on the fly and they do not always have the support they need.