Overcoming Barriers to Learning - Online vs. Traditional Classroom

In today's increasingly technologically sophisticated world, the online environment has become ubiquitous for the younger generation in particular. Teens and college-age students alike expect to be able to access information quickly and to have more visual and more engaging content at their disposal. This can lead to new barriers to learning in a traditional classroom, in addition to those that already may have existed. Some barriers to learning in a traditional classroom which may be addressed by a virtual classroom are personal - students who learn at different paces, students who are too shy to ask questions in front of others, or the distractions posed by being surrounded by other students. In a brick-and-mortar classroom, a student's personality may prevent him or her from learning, but this may also be the case in a virtual classroom. How the issues are addressed may be more important than the actual learning environment.

 Students often have questions that they are unwilling to ask in class because they assume that the others already know the answer. This feeling of being behind is important in differentiation. In a traditional classroom, it is more difficult to address the needs of students who learn at different paces. A student who needs constant attention and extra help with a topic often means that the rest of the class is neglected while the teacher helps the slower learner catch up, or that the student stays behind while the rest of the class goes on. Asynchronous communication can help overcome this barrier on different levels. First, it can overcome the unwillingness to pose a question - emailing the teacher keeps the interaction private, eliminating the feeling of being the only one who doesn't understand and by extension, the feeling of being judged by other students. The extra interaction with the teacher can also lead to a better management of differentiation for the teacher. If the teacher regularly monitors student responses to activities and reaches out to those who are struggling (based on responses or a failure to respond at all), s/he can minimize the possibility of the "lost" student without taking away from the learning experiences of the faster learners. Additional teacher explanation or online practice for the slower student can be provided as needed to keep him or her on track.

Being unable or unwilling to focus when seated next to another student sometimes interferes with a student's ability to learn. While this issue cannot be completely solved with online learning, it can help with one issue while creating another. There may not be a best friend or a disruptive student to distract the learner, but the mobility of a virtual classroom presents other possible distractions. When the learning environment changes from a traditional classroom with other students to a virtual one, it also changes from the traditional model of a teacher-monitored environment. The teacher can no longer direct a student's focus or eliminate distractions, so I think there is more possibility of procrastination and distracted learning. Especially for entirely online courses, setting specific and regular due dates for activities AND having alternate contact methods for high school students and their parents would be rather important. If a student is not keeping up with deadlines, there must be a way to contact him or her (or the parents in extreme cases) outside of the virtual classroom.

Course completion is difficult if a student has not been kept on task, whether face-to-face or online. It may be more important and  more difficult to monitor online students to keep them on-task in order to ensure course completion. As a personal note to this point, my daughter had to finish her senior year of high school entirely online due to health issues. She is normally a very bright, motivated student, but there were no set deadlines for her work, and no teacher follow-up to ensure that she was progressing. Consequently, the five courses to complete her diploma have dragged on over two years. While this is perhaps an extreme case, I do know that getting behind due to  a lack of contact can lead to bigger problems with completing coursework. My daughter will finish online high school within the next month and has been accepted to college for next fall despite the two-year senior year, but no thanks to any help from the online high school faculty or program. The importance of deadlines for keeping students on task and on track cannot be overemphasized in online learning. There are probably more distractions in a student's environment while s/he is taking an online course than there are in the traditional face-to-face classroom, and the online instructor must be aware of the difficulty and importance of directing a student's focus when there is no in-person contact.

In this age of emphasis on differentiated learning, educators should be particularly aware of the importance of asking how a student's personality affects his or her learning before deciding on a brick-and-mortar classroom or an online environment. If  the choice is an online or blended course, the instructor should be aware of the barriers to learning which may exist for individual students (just as a teacher is aware of barriers in a brick-and-mortar classroom) and should be sure to have tools available to monitor student progress in such a way as to identify at-risk students and to follow through on providing differentiated instruction for those who need extra help, or motivation to participate and learn for those who need help in focusing on the assigned activities.