Online Learning: What We Know and What We Don't Know

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the trend to the use of online learning more extensively as well as our experience with many new, and often unusual, situational variations. This article reviews what we know about the important factors affecting effective online learning, summarizes the extensive research findings about online learning, reviews some of the overall gaps in the research in terms of moving the state-of-the-art forward, and provides a summary of types of initiatives that departments, colleges, and universities can take to upgrade their online teaching/learning offerings. It also provides a summary of complementary opportunities/strengths and challenges provided by online teaching. Challenges include additional skills to be learned by faculty, various challenges in implementing integrity tools, mode selection issues, lowered perceived learning experience, increased faculty workload, student choice "traps," and faculty satisfaction conflicts.