How to Get to Know Your Students as Learners
A few years ago in an online course, I had a student who posted very little in the first couple of discussion boards, mainly stating agreement with the original post or short replies that felt perfunctory. I assumed disengagement or lack of interest. Then, three weeks into the course, she changed her approach and submitted a recorded response that revealed critical thinking, curiosity, and reflection. She had been considering complex ideas and digging into outside resources, deep learning that was hidden by her difficulties with the written word that she didn’t want to show publicly. I'd mistaken a communication challenge for a lack of investment. If I hadn't happened to listen carefully to that recording, I might never have known.
That assumption has stuck with me, because it points to something important: knowing your students doesn't happen by accident in a virtual course. In a physical classroom, you pick up hundreds of small signals just by being in the room — who lights up during a particular activity, who's distracted, who lingers after class to keep talking about something. Engaging in dialogue to explore ideas often happens naturally. Online, the context changes. If you want to know your students as learners, you have to create a way to surface that knowledge on purpose.
This is the difference between knowing about a student and knowing them as a learner. The first is biographical — where they're from, what they do for fun, their favorite subject. Useful as a relationship-builder, but thin. The second is about how they think, what conditions help them do their best work, what confuses them and why, what kind of feedback is useful for their learning. That kind of knowing takes intention to build in an asynchronous environment when a teacher likely will never “meet” a student face to face.
A few ways this intentionality could be constructed:
Make the get-to-know-you activity do real “diagnostic” work.
Most courses open with some version of an introduction post — name, location, a fun fact, why they chose the course. Those are fine as icebreakers, but they rarely tell you anything about how a student learns. A stronger version asks students to reflect on their own learning history: a time they struggled and what helped, sharing a piece of feedback that was memorable, what environment they're working in this semester (a shared computer, a chaotic house, a demanding job). One student in my own course this past year mentioned that she would be working on the class from a hospital waiting room several days a week while a family member had treatments. That single detail changed how I read her later posts — a shorter response wasn't disengagement, it was the reality that I'd have missed if I'd only asked "what's your favorite hobby?"
Three questions one GOA teacher asks at the start of every semester
Treat early work as a source of information, not just a grade.
The first substantive assignment in a course is a chance to learn how a student approaches a problem before you've really built any relationship with them. Reading it with that lens — what does this reveal about their process, their confidence, their gaps — rather than only checking it against a rubric gives you material to draw on throughout the course. A quick private note to yourself after reading early work ("tends to overexplain, might be second-guessing herself" or "strong ideas, weak organization — probably new to this format") becomes a reference point for how you might respond to that student in later work.
Build in recurring, low-stakes check-ins.
Students change over the course of a term — home situations shift, confidence grows or wavers, interest in a topic spikes or fades, different assignment types can result in varied quality of work. A single intro survey in the first week captures a snapshot, but perhaps not the learner as they are in week eight. A short check-in every few weeks — even just "how's the pace feeling, what's working, what's not, what were you most proud of in our course this week" — keeps the picture current and signals that you're paying attention over time, not just at the start.
Week 2 of GOA's Architecture course. The check-in says plainly what it is not — untimed, ungraded, not a test — before asking students to account for the week behind them. The questions change week to week based on what the course just covered.
None of this is about knowing more for its own sake. It's about the fact that so many of the decisions a teacher makes — how to group students, how to pace a unit, how to phrase feedback so it moves learning forward — depend on understanding who's in the room, even when there's no room. In an asynchronous virtual course, that knowledge has to be built by design.
Natalie is a clinical psychologist who has spent her career in schools – public, private, and international – as a teacher, counselor, psychologist, and administrator. She is passionate in encouraging students to become self-directed learners and is excited to work with GOA in implementing competency-based coursework. She recently returned to the US after 15 years in Asia and lives in the quintessential New England town of Foxboro, MA. She teaches several psychology courses, coaches various course teams, and supports course design. When not working remotely with GOA, you can find her spending time with family, playing with her two cats, or traveling far and wide.
