5 Tips for Keeping Virtual Learners Engaged

"Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops." Henry Adams wrote that, and I opened with it deliberately.

By early 2021, the verdict on virtual learning had hardened. It doesn't work. People are exhausted by it. Bring back the classroom.

I thought, and still think, that verdict was aimed at the wrong target. The problem was never virtual learning. It was those of us designing it.

When the world shifted overnight, most virtual learning was in-person material moved onto a screen. Same runtime, same structure, same assumption that attention behaves identically whether someone is in a room with peers or alone at a kitchen table with Slack open. Of course it failed. It was never designed for the medium it was delivered in.

The classroom and the desk, the icons of education, got replaced by a headset and a laptop without warning. What disappeared with them was the protected time and space that learning used to get automatically. The need to learn didn't go anywhere. The conditions that made it possible did.

So these five tips are about designing for the actual medium rather than apologizing for it.

Worth reading if your organization has quietly concluded virtual learning doesn't work. It might be true of your virtual learning specifically, and that's a fixable problem rather than a permanent one.