Mohave College

Dr. Jenna Lowder reframes online teaching for today’s distracted, multitasking learners, urging instructors to reduce friction, build curiosity loops, personalize feedback, and design micro learning experiences that align with human behavior while preserving rigor through clear objectives and authentic engagement.

If you’re like me, you are from a learning era of compliance, seat-time logic, forced interaction, instructor-centered control, and assumptions about traditional students. But modern online learners are working adults, caregivers, first-generation, rural, exhausted, and navigating economic stress and fragmented attention. Many of them have been raised on endless scrolling and short-form content that hacks the brain’s dopamine system and rewards them with new and exciting content with every swipe.

How do we reach them? Hack the brains they have, not the brains we think they should have.

The answer does not lie in plug-and-play courses, AI grading, overly-rigid due dates, or hours of recorded lectures.

Lest you think I am suggesting a giant pendulum swing, I am also not advocating for unguided self-pacing, ungrading, or grading based on anything other than content mastery. Grades need to accurately reflect the explicit course learning objectives, and those objectives need to be concise and reflect the overarching themes of the course.

Stop the information overload. Overload is not rigor. What are your 3-5 main course objectives? How will you know when your students have mastered them? Work backward to design learning experiences that meet students where they are and allow flexibility, choice, and multiple ways to demonstrate learning.

Students love a reward, which is why endless scrolling is so addictive. Students must want to persist in your class because they value future rewards in the course.

One of the keys to platforms like TikTok and Instagram is frictionless entry. For your students, this means no long setup and a fun, rewarding way to consume the syllabus. This can be a short video you make (bonus points for making it entertaining or using editing software) where you tell just the highlights. Begin each module with a compelling story, question, or problem to be solved. Instead of “Read Chapter 5 and watch the lecture on Interpersonal Conflict,” start first by asking them to submit a quick short write before they even read the content. “Tell me about a time you had a miscommunication that led to a negative outcome. What could you have done differently?” This makes the module about them, not about the content yet.

“We reach modern learners by reducing friction, building curiosity loops, delivering human feedback, and designing flexible micro learning that meets them where they are today.”

Create curiosity loops. Curiosity and uncertainty create anticipation and often lead them to stumble upon the truth. Create spaces for aha moments. Give a surprising example. Make your examples personal. Vary your assignments. If you are constantly asking them to submit 2-page summaries, surprise them by asking for a 1-minute video instead. Ask them to engage people around them. “Ask a parent or best friend what their most cherished memory of you is, and then tell them your favorite memory of them. Where did the conversation go? How does sharing create intimacy?”

Social media provides constant and rapid feedback. You should, too. Don’t delay assignment grading. Say something specific, and if they did poorly, offer them the chance to expand on the content for a higher grade. The back-and-forth conversation about their weekly work leads to relationship-building and personal connection, maybe even more addictive than social media. The days of passive consumption are gone, and modern brains expect interaction. “This is great!” is not adequate feedback.

“Your experience as a wildland EMT/firefighter was the perfect example of how important accurate communication is during a high-pressure situation. I can’t wait to hear more about it!” This says that you actually read the response, you liked it, and you are interested in more responses like that in the future.

Break content into micro-learning units. Cognitive load theory tells us our working memory has a limited capacity, so we need to design our instructional material to avoid overwhelming that memory system. When possible, stick to single-purpose activities and one core idea per assignment.

Because every swipe of social media brings something novel, you too can include novelty in your visuals, tone, pacing, and use of media. Make the learning relevant to whatever their major is or whatever interests them. Provide choice.

People learn differently now. If we spend our time lamenting how students should learn instead of meeting them where they are, we lose valuable learning time and force them to fit into an educational model that no longer serves them.

Traditional pedagogy does not serve modern online students. You don’t need to turn your online course into a series of TikTok videos or YouTube shorts, but the reality is that humans in general have not built the stamina to consume course content in the ways we did just a couple of decades ago. Any tiny tweaks or incremental changes you can start making now to reduce friction, increase interaction, build curiosity, and make learning feel more human can dramatically improve student persistence, engagement, and ultimately, mastery. The future of online learning does not belong to the faculty member who uploads the most content. It belongs to the instructor who best understands the learner sitting behind the screen.