Ways to Improve Online Learning

By Susan Russell, Educational Audiologist

How are you finding the online learning experience? Are you finding it difficult to hear your teachers at times and see their faces?

As a student who is hard of hearing, you may find that learning online is challenging. Even some of your friends who do not use hearing aids or cochlear implants may be finding it challenging as well.

So... what can you do to make it easier to hear and see your teacher?

First of all, you have to do what your hearing teacher has been telling you all along ☺… advocate for yourself! That means you need to speak to your teacher about what works for you.

Here are some things you might suggest...

1) External Microphone

If your teacher is not using an external microphone already, please ask if they have one. If they do, please ask them to use it when they are teaching. This will not only help you but it will help other students. The microphone that is built into the laptop is far from the teacher’s mouth and it may make it more difficult to pick up the softer speech sounds such as “s”, “f”, “t” and “th”. If the teacher is wearing a “boom” style microphone, it will be able to pick up these soft speech sounds more easily as it is closer to their mouth.

2) Reduce Background Noise

Complete quiet is the best environment for your teacher to be in. If you can hear a fan or low hum of a TV in the background, please ask your teacher to turn these noises off. Make sure your workspace at home is quiet as well.

3) Ensure Good Lighting

Good lighting not only helps you but it will help anyone who is learning online. Even those with typical hearing lipread ☺

Make sure the teacher has the light source in front of them and not behind them. When a light source such as a window is behind someone, it casts a shadow on their face. This makes it difficult to lipread.

You can try to “Pin” the teacher to see their face better. Here are instructions from Google:

Once in a video call, to pin a participant...

a) Tap and hold a person’s icon > tap pin.

b) Tap the People tab > select a participant to pin.

Some teachers like to choose a background to make things more fun. Please let your teacher know if they have chosen to use a background that is distracting to you.
Sometimes there is a mismatch between the teacher’s video and their voice. As you know, this makes it very hard to lipread. This usually happens if your teacher has a slow internet connection. Please let your hearing teacher know if this is happening and they will follow up with your online teacher.

4) Captioning

As you know, captioning for videos can be very helpful. Ensure that your teacher is using videos that provide captioning. However, live captioning (which occurs when a teacher is instructing in real time) may or may not be helpful. Not all live captioning is accurate.

5) Use FM / Remote Mic Systems

If you have hearing loss in both ears and wear hearing aids or cochlear implants, using your school FM transmitter (mic) with your audio cord is the best way for you to hear your teacher online. It’s much better than using standard headphones. If you do not have this equipment at home, please speak to your hearing teacher.

If you have typical hearing in one ear and hearing loss in the other ear, it would be best to use attenuated headphones or earbuds. This will help to protect your hearing in your better hearing ear.

6) Classmates

If you are finding that more than one student is talking at a time, ask the teacher to ensure that only one student speaks at a time and the others are muted. This will not only help you but others in the class, including your teacher.
If the teacher assigns break out rooms, ask your teacher to put you with a partner rather than in a small group whenever possible.
Ask your teacher to ask each student to identify themselves when they are speaking. It will make it easier for everyone to follow along.
Ask your teacher to visually represent student comments, questions and answers on your screen for the whole class to see.

7) Access to Materials

Whenever possible, ask your teacher to share slide presentations, videos, recorded lessons, PDF’s and other materials before the online lesson. You may also need to ask your hearing teacher to ask your online teacher for a list of key words.

Which one of these suggestions do you think will help you the most?

Report abuse