As an individual instructor at a university, there are several compelling reasons to care about helping students overcome traditional barriers to education:
1. Improving Educational Equity: Traditional barriers often disproportionately affect students from marginalized or underrepresented groups. By addressing these barriers, instructors help create a more equitable and inclusive educational environment where all students have the opportunity to succeed.
2. Enhancing Student Outcomes: Barriers like financial difficulties, lack of access to resources, or cultural and language differences can significantly hinder a student’s ability to engage with course material and perform academically. Instructors who actively work to minimize these barriers can enhance overall student outcomes and academic performance.
3. Building a Supportive Learning Environment: When instructors acknowledge and address these barriers, they foster a supportive and understanding atmosphere in their classrooms. This can improve student engagement, increase participation, and promote a more positive learning experience for everyone.
4. Encouraging Lifelong Learning: Students who feel supported and capable of overcoming educational hurdles are more likely to develop a love for learning and continue their education beyond their current circumstances. Instructors play a crucial role in instilling these attitudes.
5. Personal and Professional Fulfillment: Helping students overcome barriers can be deeply rewarding for instructors. It allows them to make a tangible difference in their students’ lives, which can contribute to greater job satisfaction and a sense of personal fulfillment. (Hollywood isn’t the dream factory, we here are in the business of making dreams come true.)
By focusing on overcoming these barriers, we not only enhance the individual success of their students but also contribute to the broader goals of their institutions and society.
So what are the most common barriers to distance education, and what can we do when so little is in our control?
Limited Internet Access: The pandemic helped show just how uneven high-speed internet access is distributed across the USA (Gupta et al., 2022).
Instructors and instructional designers can have an immediate ability to minimize the impact of this barrier by reducing the bandwidth needed through several best practices. The first is to reduce file sizes by lowering resolution on images, reducing bitrate on media, and increasing the use of compression. Are you using an image that is high resolution enough to put on a billboard when students are only going to be viewing the image on their cell phones? Do you have a baud rate on your voice-only lecture that is suitable for the archive of an orchestral performance? Minimizing the bandwidth needed for students can have an immediate impact on their need for high-speed internet. Second is that instructors and designers can try and ensure there is an option to download media in addition to simply streaming media. For excessively slow or intermittent internet, the ability to download a video or audio and consume the media without the risk of interruption through buffering breaks can help minimize disruptions. For internet connections that are limited to an extreme, having alternatives to rich media, such as transcripts or other alternative formats, can make all the difference.
Access to University Resources: Some online students may have limited access to library resources, labs, or study spaces. This is especially true when students are at a greater physical distance from the campus (Russo-Gleicher, 2013). Instructors can be proactive in communicating what resources are available and giving specific instructions on how to access those resources. When resources are explicitly connected to instruction, such as the library in times of research, or more situationally connected to the class, such as counseling services in the aftermath of a traumatic event, a direct introduction can be extra helpful. Many students need an explicit invitation to use the services they are entitled to.
Access to Accommodations: Online students with disabilities are still entitled to necessary accommodations. Instructors should receive communication from the school’s disability office with regard to specific accommodations for students as they arise. (Tandy & Meacham, 2009) Many disabilities are “invisible,” and this is only compounded by distance education. As much as distance education allows for greater access, it can hide the need for accommodations. Instructors have two opportunities to help address this barrier. The first is reminding students of the disability office and how to access the support, and the second opportunity is with regard to Universal Design for Learning (Tobin, 2014). When the disability office shares a necessary accommodation, consideration should be given to making the change in the course for all students on an ongoing basis, which can help all students, especially those who, while deserving and needing an accommodation, may be reluctant to reach out to the disability office.
Lack of Motivation: Online students can often struggle with motivation without the in-person structure. (Gupta et al., 2022)(McManus et al., 2017) (Bishop-Monroe, 2020) Instructors can help boost student motivation in several ways. Most significantly by building rapport through an increased instructor presence (Bishop-Monroe, 2020). The key to instructor presence is a sense for students that the instructor is both human and is invested in their success, which makes weekly announcements that much more critical.
Glazier and Harris identified five key aspects to building rapport with students which are:
“The instructor explains how the class prepares them for their future careers/life.
The instructor explains materials clearly and gives clear instructions.
The instructor is available and approachable.
The instructor in the class is organized.
The instructor responded promptly to questions.” (2020)
Also key to maintaining student motivation and building rapport is early intervention and being proactive with students who are either not participating or not performing (Franklin, 2015).
Communication Barriers: Effective communication with instructors and peers is key, and it’s important for instructors to be proactive with clear communication as well as to model effective communication for students. (Detres et al., 2020) . Being proactive and timely with regard to grading feedback (Detres et al., 2020), one needs to be proactive and leverage early intervention (Muljana & Tian Luo, 2019). This can be done in a variety of ways, including regular weekly announcements, a regular grading schedule, personalized and meaningful feedback, early intervention, and timely responses. Being clear on the ways students can reach you can go a long way. Include multiple communication methods along with your availability in your email signature and at the closing of weekly announcements.
Offering students the option of choosing the medium for communications whenever appropriate can also allow students to use the medium they are most effective in (Tobin, 2014), for example, allowing audio in discussion posts and modeling the use of those alternative media can give students flexibility in choosing their preferred medium.
Financial Constraints: Not unique to online education, student financial constraints are an important barrier to online education.(Gupta et al., 2022)(Detres et al., 2020)(McManus et al., 2017) The use of open online resources, the inclusion of free software options for projects(Tobin, 2014), and the conscious effort to minimize costs for students though the choice of textbooks and tools needed can help to elevate this barrier to online education. The use of less “resource-intensive” tools can help reduce the need for students to upgrade to the newest computer hardware. And the connection to university software resources. Many students, for example, are not aware that they have access to software paid for by the university, such as the Microsoft Office Suite.
Isolation: Online students often feel isolated from classmates, instructors, and the school at large. (Travers, 2016)(Farmakis & Kaulbach, 2013)(Gupta et al., 2022) (Studebaker & Curtis, 2021)(McManus et al., 2017) (Willis et al., 2013). Individual instructors can foster a sense of community and connection with a communication and media-rich classroom. Lack of social interaction is quite detrimental (Studebaker & Curtis, 2021) and increasing the presence of both the instructor and other students through the use of video by both students and faculty can go a long way to facilitate a sense of connection. The inclusion of a space for socialization and non-course-related sharing, such as a “coffee house” discussion area or chat area, can also help foster community. Even voice-over tools can help (Studebaker & Curtis, 2021), as can the sharing of student presentations with each other. Instructors must create a sense of belonging when they promote student-to-student interactions (Muljana & Tian Luo, 2019) and model the behavior and interactions they want to see in class (Farmakis & Kaulbach, 2013).
Instructor Availability: Instructors face many of the same obstacles to online education and still may need to be readily available for questions or support outside of office hours (Henry, 2020)(Glazier & Harris, 2021)(Muljana & Tian Luo, 2019) (Detres et al., 2020) (Bishop-Monroe, 2020). Including office hours and methods of communication in email signatures and at the bottom of each announcement can reinforce the instructor’s availability and in general to overcommunicate availability. In addition, instructors can accommodate communications using a variety of methods. (Glazier & Harris, 2021)(Sorensen & Donovan, 2017).
The key to student perceived instructor availability is the Timeliness and kindness in responses (Detres et al., 2020). It’s the quality of the interaction that makes the single biggest difference (Heilporn & Lakhal, 2022) . Instructor presence needs to be actively fostered (Muljana & Tian Luo, 2019)(Glazier & Harris, 2020), and this can be done through overcommunication of availability, both in terms of time and methods of contact, and by being proactive in reaching out to students who may be reluctant to reach out for help themselves.
Time Management: Many students choose distance education due to additional demands on their lives. Employment, job obligations, military service, and illness are all examples that are common. (Bishop-Monroe, 2020)(Henry, 2020) (Muljana & Tian Luo, 2019) (Heilporn & Lakhal, 2022)(McManus et al., 2017)(Sorensen & Donovan, 2017) (Detres et al., 2020)(Fetzner, 2013). Students already needing flexibility in their schedule will need to balance these outside obligations with the time needed for their schoolwork. (Franklin, 2015)
Instructors and instructional designers can support students with designs that are asynchronous in nature whenever possible. Requiring an entire class to come together at one time can prove insurmountable for students with extended obligations elsewhere. Offering time Management Resources (Sorensen & Donovan, 2017) and sharing advice on scheduling and productive physical environments (Bishop-Monroe, 2020) can both support students with time management skills, but also help with community building.
So what can we do today?
There are several simple tasks that instructors can do and a few habits to start building today, which will help to minimize these barriers to distance education for students, which in turn will help with student retention, student learning, and student satisfaction.
1. Edit your email and announcement signature to be clear about your availability and methods to reach you.
2. Edit your introduction announcement to include a video introduction & details on different methods to connect with you.
3. Craft a second announcement that highlights the support services available to students, such as the disability office, the veterans office, the writing center, and even ones you may consider obvious, such as the library. Be sure to include a description of what they do and how students can connect.
4. Begin the habit of weekly announcement sent on the first day of the week for each course, a solid announcement may seem like it’s redundant since it will include much of the same information as the introduction section for the week’s page on the LMS but it serves more than just an informational purpose. Include a video version of the announcement to be set along with the text version.
5. Promote student-to-student interactions and encourage audio/video recordings made by students where appropriate.
6. Create spaces for socialization outside of coursework, such as a “Coffee House Discussion Area,” and remember to monitor it, or “seed” the discussion. This can be an area to share time management tips.
7. Be proactive with student intervention & timely with student feedback and responses to for assistance.
8. Take note of the load time for courses you are teaching, do some images take an unusually long time to load? Open a ticket with IT or Design & Development as needed.
9. Review the courses you are teaching from your cell phone, this can be built into a habit as a way to check on your weekly announcement. Did it post correctly, and do the rest of the week’s resources seem accessible on the phone?
Christopher Bergeron 
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