Keywords

Introduction

Over the last 20 years, primary and secondary students have increasingly enrolled in online courses (Taie & Goldring, 2019). For instance, in North America, most students have easy access to online learning options at low or no cost to the student (Digital Learning Collaborative, 2019). Most of these students choose to enroll in one or two online courses to supplement their in-person coursework. By taking online courses, students can access classes that may not be offered locally, recover previously failed credits, and/or learn during times that are more convenient for them. Full-time online learning options, commonly called cyber schools, are also increasing in popularity for those students who require high levels of flexibility due to other pursuits such as competitive athletics. They may be pivoting from home schooling but still want to learn from home or are leaving in-person schooling due to health, safety, or personal reasons (Evergreen Educational Group, 2017).

Growth in online course enrollments at the primary and secondary levels has varied greatly across counties (Barbour, 2018). For online enrollments to increase, there needs to exist government and public support, along with access to adequate Internet (Palvia et al., 2018). Although Internet access and telecommunication infrastructures have rapidly grown and strengthened to make online learning possible, the lack of government and public support has limited or even completely prevented actual online course enrollments from occurring in many countries. However, in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19, countries throughout the world, including those who were previously resistant to online learning, closed their school buildings and shifted to learning online. While researchers have correctly pointed out that this emergency remote learning is not the same as preplanned online learning (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust, & Bond, 2020), it is likely this experience will have a lasting impact on government and public support for online learning throughout the world.

There are potential benefits to learning online, but those benefits also come with associated challenges. For instance, research has repeatedly shown that students are less likely to pass online courses compared to in-person courses (Freidhoff, 2021). High attrition rates can be attributed to low learner engagement and lack of support (Borup, Graham, West, Archambault, & Spring, 2020). While students and their parents are drawn to online learning, they are often ill-prepared for its difficulties. Learning online can be especially challenging because students not only need to learn the course material online but also need to learn how to learn online (Lowes & Lin, 2015). Just as teaching demands different skills than in-person teaching (Pulham & Graham, 2018), learning online requires different skill sets than what is required to learn in person.

Primary and secondary online course providers need to carefully consider both how the courses are designed and the supports that are provided to teachers and students. In this chapter, we first share the 4Es framework that can help in the design and evaluation of effective online learning activities and courses. Following, we use the Academic Communities of Engagement (ACE) framework to discuss how online students’ engagement in online learning activities can be supported by their course community (e.g., teachers, mentors, peers) and personal community (e.g., parents, family, and friends).

Online Courses and Design Models

The beginning of online learning can be marked in the 1990s when the Internet became easily navigable and affordable for many households. However, the roots of online learning are firmly grounded in the much deeper history of distance education. Distance education began over a century ago as correspondence courses where students were mailed paper packets of content and activities that they completed and mailed back to the instructor for grading. Radio, television, and then computers allowed students to learn with richer content, but individualized interaction with their instructor was limited, and they had little or no communication with other students in the course. Dial-up Internet in the 1990s with email, discussion forums, and basic learning management systems (LMS) allowed students to have more communication than ever before. Today, faster Internet speeds and the advent of new technologies have allowed for new forms of content, communication, collaboration, and creation (for a more detailed history of primary and secondary distance and online learning, see Barbour, 2019).

Often K-12 online learning programs are categorized by their comprehensiveness (supplemental vs. full-time), their reach (global, national, multistate, state, multi-district, or single district), or the body that has operational control (independent vendor, state, university, regional authority, consortium, local board, private school, public school) (Watson, Murin, Vashaw, Gemin, & Rapp, 2011). However, these categorizations provide little insight into how the courses are actually designed. As a result of shifting to remote learning due to COVID-19, many teachers found themselves in the role of instructional designer, asking themselves, “what should be included in my online class? how should I organize and present them in the required online learning platform?, how should I teach remotely? and how do I know my students are learning?” (Wang, 2021, p. 9). In response, the Content, Activities, Facilitation, and Evaluation (CAFE) model was created to help elementary and secondary teachers transition their instruction online. It asks teachers to organize their instructional content in a systematic way (Content), design and develop various activities (Activities), facilitate online learning interactions (Facilitate), and then evaluate learning performance/outcomes (Evaluate) (Wang, 2021) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
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CAFE for Design Online Instruction. (Adapted from Wang, 2021)

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As described by the CAFE model among many other instructional design models, one of the key elements is learning interactions. Graham (2006) explained that learning interactions can be categorized based on the flexibility in time and place that students participate. Most course designs provide students with a high degree of flexibility with respect to the time of day that they complete learning activities with optional supplemental synchronous sessions (Digital Learning Collaborative, 2019). Similarly, course providers tend not to place any restrictions on where students participate in learning activities. However, at the local level some schools restrict students’ flexibility by requiring them to attend a specific class time in their local brick-and-mortar school. This additional structure appears to help some students to participate in learning activities more consistently (Borup & Stimson, 2019).

Interactions that make up the course design can also be categorized by what or who the student is interacting with. For instance, Moore (1989) identified the following three types of interaction that act as the primary building blocks when designing learning experiences: student-content, student-teacher, and student-student interactions (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
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Three types of interaction. (Created by Jered Borup, CC BY)

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Despite the ability to have rich human interactions, a large portion of the K-12 online courses are actually designed as if they were high-tech correspondence courses, rich in media and learner-content interaction but lacking regular interactions with the teacher and others in the course. These courses can also focus on scalability by replacing some subjectively scored assessments such as projects that require teacher grading and feedback with objectively scored assessments that can be graded using technology. Teachers in these independent study programs are made available for students to contact for help but tend not to proactively contact students or attempt to develop close relationships with them (Oviatt, Graham, Borup, & Davies, 2018). These courses tend to have high attrition rates (Hawkins, Graham, Sudweeks, & Barbour, 2013), and student success often depends on their local support systems. These flexible courses are especially common in supplemental online programs where students follow a variety of different school calendars for their in-person courses. However, even cyber schools where students take most or all of their courses online and could follow a common calendar tend to follow an independent study model (Woodworth et al., 2015). Full-time cyber schools’ focus on flexible pacing and independent study is particularly concerning because students could graduate from secondary school without any experiences collaborating with peers. Other programs emphasize developing close caring relationships between students and teachers, where teachers provide students with high levels of personalized feedback and encouragement. Despite their physical separation, teachers can successfully form caring relationships with students that allow them to better met their students’ needs (Velasquez, Graham, & West, 2013).

The 4Es: Goals when Designing and Assessing Learning in Online Environments

Regardless of the course model, to build a quality online experience, it is necessary to focus on specific goals when it comes to designing and assessing learning. Building on previous research and frameworks such as David Merrill’s (2009) e3 and Liz Kolb’s (n.d.) Triple E frameworks, Borup, Graham, Short, and Shin (2021) identified the following four goals when designing and evaluating online learning activities and assessments: enable, extend, engage, and elevate (the 4Es; see Fig. 3). Specifically, the 4Es framework asks if the online course activities:

  • Enable new types of learning activities?

  • Engage students in meaningful interactions with others and the course content?

  • Elevate the learning activities by including real-world skills that benefit students beyond the classroom?

  • Extend the time, place, and ways that students can master learning objectives?

Fig. 3
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The 4Es. (Created by Jered Borup, CC BY)

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Enable

Instructors and designers may be tempted to replicate the in-person learning experience online. For instance, Woodworth et al. (2015) examined full-time cyber schools and stated:

Some [online] schools may function exactly like the traditional brick-and-mortar school. They may require all students to log in at specific times to receive instruction with the only difference from a traditional brick-and-mortar school being that the students are in different physical locations. (p. 42)

The attempt to digitize the in-person learning experience was also evident when social distancing requirements required primary and secondary schools to close their buildings and rapidly move online. Understandably, many teachers and administrators began using synchronous webinar platforms in an attempt to replicate what they would have done in-person (Lowenthal, Borup, West, & Archambault, 2020).

While some aspects of teaching and learning appear to transfer well from the in-person to the online environment, others can become more challenging and frustrating. One example is establishing social presence in an online setting. Social presence encompasses fostering a trusted community in the online setting including developing interpersonal relationships, connecting to learners, and helping them to feel comfortable in the online environment (Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007). Developing strategies that promote social presence in online settings may be foreign to teachers, particularly when they are separated from students in space and/or time.

Instead of simply digitizing in-person activities, a better approach is to carefully consider the possibilities of the online environment and then leverage those possibilities to design online learning activities and assessments. In doing so, online technologies and learning environments can unlock and enable activities that teachers and students would not be able to do, or at least very difficult to do, without online technology.

Engage

Learner engagement is frequently credited for learning success, and its absence may be blamed for education’s ills. While learner engagement is far from a panacea, research has confirmed that online learner engagement is an important factor in several learning outcomes including performance, pass rates, and sense of community (Avcı & Ergün, 2019; Heyman, 2010; Shackelford & Maxwell, 2012). Sustained learner engagement is so valuable and elusive that Sinatra, Heddy, and Lombardi (2015) referred to it as the “holy grail of learning” (p. 1). Course design can play an important part in both the levels and forms of learner engagement that are required.

One challenge of sustaining learner engagement is that the research community has yet to produce a widely accepted definition (Halverson & Graham, 2019). The research community does agree that engagement is a complex, multidimensional concept. The primary disagreements occur when identifying and defining the dimensions of engagement (Bond & Bedenlier, 2019; Redmond, Heffernan, Abawi, Brown, & Henderson, 2018; Rodgers, 2008). Within the context of online learning, researchers tend to focus on the following three dimensions of engagement:

  • Behavioral – the physical energy that students exert when completing learning activities. The PIC model categorizes activities as either passive, interactive, or creative.

  • Affective – the emotional energy that is present when completing learning activities.

  • Cognitive – the mental energy that students exert to learn the course content and develop new skills (Borup, 2018; Borup et al., 2020).

Teachers commonly refer to these dimensions when they talk about engaging students’ hands (behavioral engagement), hearts (affective engagement), and heads (cognitive engagement) (see Fig. 4). The three dimensions of engagement also influence each other. For instance, too often students are not affectively engaged in their learning because they are given passive learning activities. If technology is used in ways that encourage students to be more active participants, it can increase their enjoyment and affective engagement. At the same time, if students are tasked with engaging behaviorally but lack cognitive and affective engagement, the task will be viewed as “busy work.”

Fig. 4
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Dimensions of student engagement (created by Jered Borup, CC BY)

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One framework that helps to categorize students’ behavioral engagement in learning activities and examine learning activities in comparison with what could be done without technology is called the PICRAT framework (Kimmons, Graham, & West, 2020). The PICRAT framework is particularly useful when designing learning activities for the online learning environment. Specifically, PIC describes students’ behavioral engagement as one of the following:

  • Passive: students learn by consuming presented information but do not control or contribute to what is presented (e.g., reading an article, listening to a podcast, watching a video).

  • Interactive: students exert some control over their learning by being an active participant in communications with others (e.g., discussions, peer reviews, study groups) or by interacting with content that is responsive or adaptive to student behavior (e.g., educational games, simulations, adaptive learning software).

  • Creative: students learn or demonstrate their learning by creating original materials and artifacts using technology (e.g., writing a report, editing a video, creating a digital poster).

The RAT element then articulates how learning activities use technology. Specifically, it categorizes the use of technology as one of the following:

  • Replaces – online technology sustains current practice without making meaningful changes to learning activities.

  • Amplifies – online technology incrementally improves learning activities in ways that may result in some improvements in learning outcomes.

  • Transforms – online technology fundamentally changes learning activities in ways that may result in significant improvement in learning outcomes.

While the PIC and RAT frameworks can each stand alone, Kimmons et al. (2020) combined them to form the PICRAT framework matrix. The matrix allows instructional designers and teachers to describe both student behavioral engagement and how the online environment and technologies enable learning activities (see Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
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The PICRAT framework matrix. (Based on Kimmons et al., 2020; graphic created by Jered Borup, CC BY)

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It is important to note the PICRAT matrix by itself does not measure the worth of a learning activity. There are times when a passive activity that simply replaces a traditional in-person environment (PR) is a good and perhaps the best activity possible. That said, an issue arises when students engage in too many passive learning experiences that go on for too long. Even in an in-person classroom, learning experiences can be too passive, but it is particularly concerning when there are too many passive learning experiences online because they require the student to maintain focus – a difficult task when students with low self-regulation skills are not under the direct supervision of the teacher and can access countless online distractions (Pettyjohn, 2012). As a result, some online tools can help to make passive learning activities such as watching a video more interactive by periodically requiring students to answer questions regarding what they are learning.

Extend

The distributed nature of online learning extends learning opportunities to students regardless of their location so long as students have an Internet-connected device. The extension in students’ place of learning focuses on access to learning opportunities, but online learning can also be extended in ways that improve how and even what students learn. For example, online learning can extend the time when students complete learning activities. While some online programs require regular synchronous class sessions, online courses are offered largely asynchronously that may be supplemented with optional synchronous sessions.

This extension of students’ learning time also affords students some flexibility and control in their pace of learning. The one-pace-fits-all approach to public education has long been highlighted as a limitation (see Skinner, 1958). Assignment deadlines (or the lack thereof) largely determine the pace of instruction, but even when courses establish weekly deadlines, students have flexibility to pace their learning during that week. Even with flexible timelines, ultimately online students will require support and feedback to help them to progress through learning activities. Not all feedback is equally valuable (Hattie, 2008). Feedback is best when it is timely, friendly, and specific (Borup, West, & Thomas, 2015). Teachers’ content and pedagogical knowledge makes them an especially important source of feedback. However, providing detailed feedback can be time-consuming, making it challenging for teachers to provide timely feedback to all of their students. As a result, some online programs use technology such as adaptive learning programs and artificial technology to provide students with in-the-moment feedback, but these types of feedback should not replace teacher feedback (Amro & Borup, 2019; Amro & Dabbagh, 2020).

The extension of students’ learning time can also have important benefits in online discussions. Certain types of students tend to struggle in synchronous discussions. For instance, students with learning disabilities, introverted tendencies, or those not proficient in the language can all struggle for different reasons to participate in fast-paced discussions and benefit when the discussion is extended to allow for extra time to reflect and form responses (Borup, West, & Graham, 2013). While these asynchronous discussions are most commonly text-based, discussion platforms are increasingly allowing for asynchronous audio and video communication. Allowing students some choice in their mode of communication will likely result in more equitable participation.

Lastly, online courses can be designed to extend the ways that students reach and demonstrate mastery of the learning objectives. This type of extension can occur to different degrees. For instance, students may be provided two options (e.g., read this article or watch this video, write a report or make a video). Students can also be provided with a choice board listing a variety of learning activities for students to choose from. At times teachers may also work with students to help them to develop their own learning goals and path to reach those goals (Arnesen, Graham, Short, & Archibald, 2019).

When students decide how their learning is extended, it is called personalized learning (Arnesen et al., 2019). While providing students with choice can potentially have positive impacts on student engagement, there are important drawbacks to allowing online students to extend and personalize their learning time, pace, and ways of learning. When students are provided with a high degree of choice in their learning time, pace, and ways of learning, it is possible to have each student completing different learning activities at any point in time, which can eliminate certain communication- and collaboration-based learning activities that require students to be working on similar tasks at similar times.

This dilemma has created a tension between interactive learning and the flexibility in pace that has helped to make online learning so popular (Borup, 2016b). Richard Cullatta, the former director of the US Department of Education, explained that learning is inherently social and issues arise when online technology is used to isolate students (Davis, 2017). As a result, courses should be carefully designed so that students have some choice in the time, pace, and ways that they learn while still allowing for meaningful opportunities for student-student communication and collaboration.

Elevate

There is also an opportunity to use online technologies and learning environments to help elevate learning activities to include higher-order and twenty-first-century skills such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity skills. Effective online activities should promote deeper learning. The 4 Shifts Protocol outlines four shifts toward more relevant, personalized learning across grade levels and content areas (McLeod & Graber, 2019). First, deeper learning is promoted by a focus on higher-level thinking such as problem-solving and creativity rather than lower-level thinking such as factual recall. Second, student agency takes a larger role in deeper learning such that students have more ownership and control over what and how they learn, offering more personalization. Third, authentic work offers students the ability to participate in meaningful learning communities that are interdisciplinary in nature and relevant to local, national, and international contexts. Fourth, deeper learning includes the strategic infusion of technology to be able to effectively mobilize shifts toward higher-level thinking, student agency, and authentic work. It is this connection to “authentic work” where online activities can elevate the learning process. Authentic intellectual work (AIW), as originally described by Newmann and Associates (1996), contains the following four key indicators: higher-order thinking, deep knowledge, substantive conversation, and connectedness to the real world (Table 1).

Table 1 AIW indicators
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AIW extends students’ learning by building new understandings and going beyond prior knowledge, valuing knowledge that extends beyond basic factual recall. It pushes students to support their new understandings through evidence (Newmann & Associates, 1996; Saye et al., 2018). These components have been correlated with the development of complex problem-solving and higher-order thinking skills (Saye et al., 2018).

AIW is frequently accomplished by using technology to situate learning tasks into “real-world” problems and projects. This can help increase elements of authentic pedagogy, including higher-order thinking skills and connections to students’ lives through engaging with meaningful, real-world problems through disciplined inquiry. Given its focus on observations, data collection, and drawing conclusions, science is full of real-world applications for students. For example, students can participate in citizen science projects that are organized online and allow them to collect and interpret data that have an impact on solving real-world problems such as biodiversity research. One such opportunity is Project Noah https://www.projectnoah.org, which allows students to learn about and identify various species of wildlife, create their own online nature journal, follow naturalists, and connect with experts in the field. Many other such projects exist and can be explored at https://www.commonsense.org/education/top-picks/real-world-science-resources-for-students.

Online activities can be structured so they allow students to engage in disciplinary literacies (Lent, 2015) that provide opportunities to read, write, and think like historians, scientists, mathematicians, and writers. For example, in social studies, they may create interactive timelines with associated narratives along with relying on valid primary and secondary sources for support. In language arts, students might write on relevant topics affecting them and the world. They may work to determine credible research on the issue and use it to support or refute claims, reflecting on multiple texts to guide their writing. They may even reach out with questions to a particular writer or researcher. Math provides the opportunity to connect to everyday life including budgeting and money management, investment and financial planning, building and engineering concepts that allow students to use information to come to a solution, calculating figures using mathematical principles, finding patterns, and estimating/generalizing. Students can use technology to communicate in authentic ways with each other but also with researchers, scientists, and other experts. Given the vast amount of information that is available online, together with the ability to communicate and collaborate with others, this provides students an avenue to engage with content in a real-word manner that includes higher-order thinking, deep knowledge, and substantive dialog to enhance learning in a meaningful way.

ACE: A Framework for Supporting Online Student Engagement

Designing and developing meaningful online learning activities following the 4Es is important, but many students will still be unable to fully engage in the activities without support from others. In fact, some students need so much support that they are told not to enroll in online courses. Rose, Smith, Johnson, and Glick (2015) explained that restricting online learning opportunities to those with low support needs results in inequitable access. Rather online programs should carefully consider the supports that are required for each student and then work to offer that support.

Support and scaffolding has long been viewed as an important part of learning, and Vygotsky (1978) argued that what students “can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone” (p. 85). Building on Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, Borup et al. (2020) argued that each student varies in their ability to independently engage in learning activities behaviorally, affectively, and cognitively. Students’ ability to independently engage in learning activities is dependent on different facilitators such as the learner’s background and characteristics as well as the learning environment and the students’ personal environment (see Fig. 6). Of the four highlighted facilitators of engagement, instructors have the most control over the learning environment and the support that they directly provide to students. However, teachers and programs can also have an impact on support that is provided by those within students’ personal environments (Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2005).

Fig. 6
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Facilitators of engagement. (Created by Jered Borup, CC-BY)

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The ACE framework identifies the support elements that can narrow or bridge the gap between learner independent engagement without support and the level of engagement that is necessary for academic success (see Fig. 7). Cognitive engagement can increase when students receive instructing and collaborating support. Behavioral engagement can increase when students receive the following types of support: (a) troubleshooting and orienting, (b) organizing and managing, and (c) monitoring and encouraging progress. Affective engagement can increase when students receive the following types of support: (a) facilitating communication, (b) developing relationships, and (c) instilling excitement for learning.

Fig. 7
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The gap between a student’s independent engagement (black triangle), the engagement necessary for academic success (dotted triangle), and the listed supports required to bridge the gap

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The ACE framework also identifies two support communities that can provide students with the support that they require: the student’s course community and student’s personal community (see Fig. 8). Actors within students’ course communities can include teachers, other students in the course, facilitators/mentors, aids, and other support staff. In many cases, the course community actors have no relationship with the student prior to the course. In contrast, actors within students’ personal communities can include parents, guardians, friends, coaches, and members of community who have developed relationships with the student outside of and prior to the course with some relationships beginning at birth. As a rule, actors in the course community will have greater knowledge of the course content and procedures, but actors in the personal community will have greater knowledge of the student’s background, interests, tendencies, strengths, and limitations.

Fig. 8
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The ACE framework with support from the course and personal communities

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Parents, guardians, and/or caretakers are likely to be the most important actors in a student’s personal community. While they can likely provide their primary students with content-related support, it becomes more difficult once students are in secondary school. As a result, parental support (which can be provided by a parent, guardian, or close family member who serves as a caretaker) tends to focus more on affective and behavioral engagement and less on cognitive engagement (Borup, 2016a; Borup, Stevens, & Hasler Waters, 2015). However, the amount of time invested in providing parental support can vary greatly. Hoover-Dempsey et al. (2005) identified several obstacles that parents encounter when providing students with support including how they have constructed and perceived their roles, parent self-efficacy that their efforts will actually impact student performance and behavior, and demands on their time. They also found that parents were more likely to provide support when they received specific invitations from teachers and their students.

Teachers are an important actor within the course community and can develop caring relationships with students while providing them with high levels of support (Velasquez et al., 2013), often their high student loads and physical separation from students may prevent them from providing each student with the level of support that they require (Hawkins, Barbour, & Graham, 2011, 2012). As a result, online programs are increasingly providing students with online or in-person facilitators (see Fig. 9). These facilitators do not replace the instructor and typically are not experts in the course content. Instead facilitators work to develop caring relationships with students and support their efforts to learn how to learn online (Borup, 2018). Teachers and facilitators can also provide students with opportunities to support each other. For instance, teachers established a student-student tutoring program at a cyber charter school (Borup, 2016b).

Fig. 9
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Online courses where students receive support from the online teacher and a facilitator

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Implications

When designing online learning for youth and children, we need to consider not only how the courses are designed but also how to develop support systems so that students are able to succeed. The 4Es framework and Academic Communities of Engagement (ACE) frameworks have important implications for steps we need to take in order to improve online students’ engagement in online learning activities and how these activities can be supported by their course community and personal communities. These include the need for additional learning opportunities and professional development for practicing teachers as well as for those who are becoming teachers as part of their teacher education programs.

Need for Additional Learning Opportunities/Experience for Teachers

Current and future educators need guidance, support, and practice in designing and implementing online/blended activities. First, school districts should support teachers with learning opportunities specific to designing effective lessons for the online/blended setting. This support may include release time for the creation and sharing of lessons and approaches, peer review of created materials, and coaching/support from skilled professionals. In addition, districts should provide the latitude for teachers to try new approaches and make adjustments as they go, including opportunities to design materials to enable new types of learning activities; engage in meaningful interaction with one another and with the content; elevate activities with authentic, real-world applications; and extend flexibility for mastering learning objectives/outcomes.

When applying design principles to online learning, teachers need professional development opportunities that are well-designed and effective. To accomplish this goal, professional development should be ongoing, be content-focused, and involve teachers as active learners (Birman, Desimone, Porter, & Garet, 2000). It should be job-embedded, meaning that it involves “systematic, planned, intentional and regularly scheduled efforts to embed teacher learning with teachers’ daily lives” (Dawson & Dana, 2018, p. 248).

In addition to designing activities, teachers may need specific professional development geared toward working with students’ personal and course communities as well as developing their teaching and social presence so that they are better equipped to cultivate critical relationships with students in online settings. These relationships can result in an increased sense of belongingness, connectedness, engagement, academic achievement, participation, and motivation (Cohen, McCabe, Michelli, & Pickeral, 2009; Miller, Riley, & Slay, 2021) – all important elements for success in the online classroom. There are a number of open educational resources, such as this volume as well as others, including those found at https://edtechbooks.org centered on blended learning approaches that may prove to be helpful when it comes to pragmatic approaches to designing online and blended learning activities.

Teacher Education Programs

In addition to professional development opportunities for current teachers, future teachers also need preparation for designing online learning for online and blended learning environments. However, historically, teacher education programs have offered limited opportunities for future teachers to create/implement online or blended lessons (Archambault, 2011; Archambault et al., 2016; Kennedy & Archambault, 2012). As a result, teacher education programs should recognize the importance of embedding coursework and practical experiences for future educators. It is important that the first-time teachers are exposed to creating online learning activities prior to their first teaching experience.

There are a number of actions teacher preparation programs can pursue to address this issue. First, programs should consider a dedicated instructional design course to teach future educators strategies for enabling, extending, engaging, and enhancing online learning activities as well as exploring uses of technology that are creative and transformative. In addition, effective technology use should be integrated throughout pedagogical and content-related coursework to ensure that future teachers can experience its modeling as a teaching tool. Often programs select one approach or the other. However, future teachers need to experience not only principles of effective lesson design but also the implementation and evaluation of such lessons and strategies for blending in-person and online instruction. Also, the inclusion of an online or blended field experience could help future teachers gain valuable experience when it comes to building comfort and capacity in an online setting. As a result of COVID-19 along with how quickly society is changing due to the connected nature of modern-day living, the need to be able to design and implement effective online lessons is more evident than ever.

Conclusion

As online offerings continue to expand at the primary and secondary levels for a variety of reasons, teachers and course providers need to be equipped with ways to help improve the design of effective online learning activities. The 4Es framework provides a structure for considering important design elements when it comes to online activities. Relatedly, the ACE framework shows how students’ course and personal communities can support their engagement when it comes to online learning. Both are important and useful tools for those involved with creating and designing quality online learning experiences for children and youth.