Online learning is convenient for many learners; it gives them the opportunity of learning without being restricted from attending a specific classroom at a specific time. While this flexibility lets the learners manage their life in a better way, many students may suffer from feeling isolated or disconnected from the community that consists of the instructor and the learners. Lack of interaction among the students and the instructor may negatively impact their learning and cause adverse emotions like anxiety, sadness, and depression.
Apart from the feeling of loneliness, sometimes students may come up with different issues as they study the course which stop them from moving forward or make them feel discouraged if we leave them alone.
To promote the inclusion and interaction in online learning, we are adding a new feature to the traditional online learning system, Tele-Instruction, which is to enable students to have interaction with the instructor at students and instructor conveniences.
Tele-Instruction’s design is based on appointments, videoconferencing, and learning management. It provides the opportunity of establishing educational interactions between distance students and the instructor, which is a crucial step to help students succeed.
The idea is to design a system in which the instructor can specify his/her available time slots (even as short as ten minutes) in a Calendar, which can be shared with the students of the course. Students access the calendar to book an appointment with the instructor. They can receive an automatic invitation to the online meeting as well as meeting reminders. The system provides the instructor with the option of recording the meeting contents which will be accessible to the students with the same or similar questions via the learning management system. A student reviews the material recommended by the learning management system before booking an appointment with the instructor for further discussions. Appointments can be merged if students have similar issues or concerns, which can also provide the possibility of peer interactions. Assigned learning material can be tracked to make sure the student has reviewed them, and the student can be evaluated afterward to make sure the issue has been solved.
Tele-Instruction can help in three categories of interaction as specified by Moore (1989), i.e., interaction with content, interaction with the instructor, and interaction with peers. Interaction with content can occur once the student percepts the recorded material provided by the learning management system. Last but not least, the learning system can improve its abilities by using machine learning algorithms and techniques to analyze the contents of the meetings and related data, classify them for future reference and use, and enhance the quality of the lectures.