How Do We Make Remote Learning Better? Listen to the Students

Between April 21 and May 14, 2020, we surveyed 3,113 undergraduate college students from 31 universities across the U.S. about their remote learning experiences.* The survey was anonymous, took 10 minutes to complete, and consisted primarily of closed-ended questions. Students had the option of writing in answers about their experiences with remote learning at the end. Their answers should guide how we, as educators, make remote learning better for this upcoming school year — for our students, and for ourselves. This 5-part series is a collaboration with Amy Jordan, Alyvia Walters, and Luna Laliberte.

Lesson #4. Encourage Students to Develop New Learning Rituals and Routines

What did students lose when their semesters went remote? Many wrote about how they missed the rituals and routines of campus life the most. Grabbing a coffee with a friend before heading to lecture. Studying together in a particular corner of the library for midterms. These aren’t just habits. Rituals create meaning. Combined with predictable routines, rituals become an infrastructure for learning.

When students went home to complete semesters on their kitchen tables, those rituals and routines vanished. Students wrote about their struggles to stay motivated; to keep track of course due dates without professors reminding them at the start of lecture; to feel confident that they could learn remotely. They blamed themselves for the struggles that came from losing their learning routines and rituals. Comments like, “I have so much trouble keeping the pace because it is hard to focus when there is no fixed schedule,” and “The schedule I made for myself was fine for the first few weeks of quarantine, but it soon fell apart,” were commonplace.

Faculty can help students create new routines and rituals in three steps:

Set the schedule. Commit to a specific weekday when you will release recorded lectures and readings each week. Most students like when this happens on Mondays. Knowing when they can expect that week’s content helps students plan, and establish a regular routine. Haphazard releases of content reduce students’ sense of control. Posting on weekends heightens their anxiety. At a time when every day feels like Wednesday, help students develop a sense of when their week should start.

Set the pace. Do not release the full semester of content all at once, even if you have recorded all your lectures in advance. Doing so signals to students that there will be little meaningful interaction with their instructor during the course. It also creates incentive for students to put work off, to ‘binge watch’, or to complete learning modules out of order — none of which are good for learning.

Set the tone. Establish opportunities for students to interact with you, voluntarily, at specific times each week. Try to set real-time class meetings for a regular day and time, either weekly or bi-weekly, and send students reminders about those sessions the day before. Hold regularly scheduled times to meet with you individually. Consider calling them ‘student hours.’ Now that none of us are on campus for ‘office hours’, let students know these are hours dedicated to meeting with them. Students ask that you not to be discouraged if attendance at those meetings is low. For those who can and do attend, these times mean a great deal.

One more lesson to go! Here’s Lesson #5: what students had to say about making evaluations feel fair. And if you’re just joining, start back at Lesson #1.

*More information on methodology: The survey was developed by Vikki Katz and Amy Jordan, approved by the Rutgers University Institutional Review Board and ran for three weeks on the Qualtrics platform, between April 21 and May 14, 2020. A total of 3,113 undergraduates from 31 U.S. universities that had shifted to remote instruction participated. Ninety-four percent were between ages 18 and 24. Sixty-five percent identified as female and 35% male, somewhat more skewed than the general 4-year college population (56% female and 44% male, according to the National Center for Education Statistics). A total of 10% of participants identified as African-American, 18% as Asian, 13% as Hispanic, and 62% as White; an additional 17% selected multiple races or ethnicities. The project was supported by the School of Communication and Information, and by the University Research Council, at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.