Understanding What Works in Humanizing Higher Education Online Courses

Abstract

In a post-COVID world, online education is more important than ever. Understanding how to make digital learning environments more humanized for learners can lead to more engaged learners. This study explores the experiences of 56 online graduate students to understand 1) What components of asynchronous, traditionally formatted online courses centered around textual discussion posts can be adapted to further humanize the course for both students and teachers? And 2) How does humanizing these courses affect the students’ interactions and learning experiences? Findings indicate that most of the changes made (weekly introductory videos from the professor, rich and detailed feedback, options for multimodal discussion board responses, and hashtagged social media posts from students and professor sharing personal events) were met with positive response for humanizing the course. Post-course surveys also shed light on additional requested techniques for humanization in online courses.