What Two Years of Online Grad School Taught Me About Loneliness by Design

This is my very first blog post as the founder of Groundwork Studios. Took me quite a while to work up the courage, but here goes nothing.

Apparently owning a small business means showing up online regularly, even though what I actually want is real conversation, not content optimized for an algorithm. But such is life in 2026.

So here's what I'm going to do instead: I'm finishing my last semester of a fully online masters in sociology, and I have a lot of thoughts about what it's like to study human connection while enrolled in a program that has left something to be desired on the community front.

As an instructional designer for online courses and programs, I'm constantly thinking about how to make learning stick, and sometimes that means reimagining how learners connect with each other in a digital space. Online programs have existed for a long time now, and AI and technology are accelerating at a ridiculous pace, but this is still something I discuss with every client I work with. I don't have all the answers, but the very meta experience of being an instructional designer inside an online masters program has my brain on overdrive, so I have a lot of thoughts.

It's easy to get stuck evaluating how each course works without looking at the full program. Individually, my program has phenomenal courses, and I've learned a lot. But two years in and nine courses later, I've had one live conversation with another student, and one live conversation with my advisor. Everything else has been email and Canvas discussion boards.

One thing I think online programs take for granted: yes, online students want flexibility. It's genuinely hard to ask adults leading busy lives to show up somewhere at a specific time when they signed up for an asynchronous program on purpose. But that doesn't mean we never want to talk to anyone. I would have loved specific reasons to actually talk to other students, on our own time, as we decided. I would have loved to meet my instructors face to face over Zoom, instead of another, "email me if you have questions." I'm a recovering honors student in instructional design. I have no questions. I can see right through every design decision made in every lesson and reading selection. I have been trained to research my question before asking for help. There has to be a better motivator.

Flexibility is an important feature in an async program, but I don't believe it has to come at the expense of human connection. When intentional reasons to contact others aren't built into a program, connection gets left to whoever has the energy to go find it after they've already read the module, done the assignment, and handled everything else life throws at them. I am an excellent case study here. I deeply crave human connection, I know what makes a learning experience more meaningful, and I STILL didn’t put in the effort required to connect to my fellow students. 

Like I said, I don’t have all the answers. I have plenty of ideas, but as my fellow instructional designers know, each situation is incredibly unique and there is no one right way to solve a problem.

So I'm going to keep writing about this here, hopefully weekly, as field notes. Part sociologist, part student, part person who designs learning experiences for a living and can't stop noticing the choices underneath my own.

If you've done an online program and felt that particular kind of isolation, or you're the one designing them, I'd like to hear about it. Reply below, message me, or schedule some time with me on Zoom to actually talk. Maybe through all this musing, and hopefully some real conversations, we can discover better ways to build authentic human connection into online learning.

Thanks for listening,

-Allison <3