Expanding interaction in online courses: integrating critical humanizing pedagogy for learner success
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Expanding interaction in online courses: integrating critical humanizing pedagogy for learner success Benjamin Gleason1 Accepted: 9 November 2020 © Association for Educational Communications and Technology 2020
Abstract Millions of college students in the U.S. are enrolled in online courses, with the global pandemic resulting in a “pivot to online” for educational and health reasons. African-American college students continue to face barriers to academic success, and this response to Kuo and Belland (in Educ Technol Res Dev 64(4):661–680, 2016) investigates how the concept of “learner interaction” supports success. Finally, this response includes examples from online courses informed by “critical humanizing pedagogy,” in which social interaction is a key driver of learning. Keywords Online learning · Higher education · African-American students · Online education · Interaction theory
Impact/value In 2018, almost 7 million students were enrolled in an online course at a degree-granting institution (National Center for Education Statistics, nd). With the current global pandemic, many institutions are offering online learning as a way to sustain educational continuity safely. Kuo and Belland (2016) investigated how African-American college students perceive online education. Many students today are enrolled in online courses while working part-time or full-time jobs, like the participants of this study. Making courses accessible to African-Americans is a critical task as Black students face a range of barriers to education (McWhirter 1997; Harper et al. 2009). Many Black students still struggle with the “digital divide” 25 years after the term was coined. Only 66% of Black households have access to broadband (Rodgrigo 2020), and almost one million Black households reported that they had “rarely” or “never” had a device to use for online education (JBHE 2020).
A Response to Kuo, Y. C., & Belland, B. R. (2016). An exploratory study of adult learners’ perceptions of online learning: Minority students in continuing education. Educational Technology Research and Development, 64(4), 661–680. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-016-9442-9. * Benjamin Gleason [email protected] 1
Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA
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In Kuo and Belland’s study, the authors explored how Black students perceived the relationship between learner interaction type and course satisfaction (i.e., conceptualized as related to factors such as internet self-efficacy and course performance). Influenced by prominent interaction theory (Moore 1989) in which online learning includes three dimensions of interaction (with the course, the instructor, and peers), the authors hypothesized that interaction with course content and instructor would predict student satisfaction, which it did. The study reiterated the importance of design features (i.e., page layout, easy course access, use of digital tools) in supporting student learning (p. 673). The finding that student interaction with the instructor was predictive of
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