Student Barriers to Active Learning in Synchronous Online Classes: Characterization, Reflections, and Suggestions
This work addresses barriers to active learning for students in online classes, helping novice educators improve course design, but it is incremental as it builds on existing educational research.
The paper characterizes student barriers to active learning in synchronous online classes through qualitative analysis of social media, interviews, and surveys, identifying themes like human-side, technological, and environmental barriers, and demonstrates benefits for novice educators in course planning with a summative study involving 12 participants.
As more and more face-to-face classes move to online environments, it becomes increasingly important to explore any emerging barriers to students' learning. This work focuses on characterizing student barriers to active learning in synchronous online environments. The aim is to help novice educators develop a better understanding of those barriers and prepare more student-centered course plans for their active online classes. Towards this end, we adopt a qualitative research approach and study information from different sources: social media content, interviews, and surveys from students and expert educators. Through a thematic analysis, we craft a nuanced list of students' online active learning barriers within the themes of human-side, technological, and environmental barriers. Each barrier is explored from the three aspects of frequency, importance, and exclusiveness to active online classes. Finally, we conduct a summative study with 12 novice educators and explain the benefits of using our barrier list for course planning in active online classes.