Deep Equity: Exploring the Human Role in Supporting Online Learning With Low-Income Youth

• In Event: Learning Beyond the Platform: Qualitative Studies in Massive Open Online Courses

Abstract

Schools serving low-income youth of color are notoriously understaffed, with insufficient course offerings (Orfield et al 2011). In such resource-starved settings, online credit-bearing courses can seem the holy grail, as students can in theory take courses without expensive adult assistance. When such courses fill transcript gaps toward college eligibility, they also seem an unquestionable equity resource: low-income students can access content (and for it, credit) not directly available in their schools.
But achieving deep equity with such courses requires students to comprehend content rather than only access it, particularly if students are otherwise underresourced or underserved in schools. This loftier quest to achieve deep equity with online content raises a core research question for our field. If the equity goal is student comprehension as educators tap online course materials for students who have been underserved in schools, what, if anything, is the human teacher still needed to do?
We studied this question during the summers of 2013 and 2014, examining the in-person roles adult instructors took on in eight multidisciplinary classrooms and then 11 mathematics classrooms where low-income students accessed online, credit-bearing college-prep course materials created by the University of California. Our research team partnered with the Early Academic Outreach Program (EAOP), a University of California (UC)-funded outreach program preparing low income students for college, to study EAOP’s offering of nearly 20 blended (face to face plus online) classrooms designed to support nearly 400 low income students’ college eligibility. In 2013, we studied eight classrooms where 200 students took online UC-made courses in several subject areas, while supported in person by a teacher and several TAs. In 2014, we studied 11 similarly staffed classrooms where students took online Algebra II courses specifically. Focus groups, classroom observations, teacher interviews, student surveys, and curriculum analysis were used to study the in-person supports adults in each room offered and students requested.

Overall, we came to understand these classrooms’ use of online materials as a quest to offer students both basic equity (content access) and deep equity (content comprehension). Deep equity occurred through human efforts to engage online material with students so students truly understood it.

This paper first proposes a taxonomy of “human roles” necessary for deep equity (content comprehension) in any subject area and then dives deeper into the human role in supporting deep equity in online math courses specifically. In summer 2013, we found seven varieties of in-person human support that were frequent and notable across the classrooms. Most offered a form of human dialogue with students that both students and adults found necessary for content comprehension. In summer 2014, we explored in more detail these forms of human support for content comprehension (deep equity) in a blended Algebra II environment. Here, we found more specific ways that students engaging online material needed adults and peers to discuss math with them until students understood it.

Authors

• Mica Pollock, University of California - San Diego

• Susan S. Yonezawa, University of California - San Diego

• Hilary I Gay, University of California - San Diego