Five lessons from teaching family history to older students online

Abstract As universities move more and more teaching online, educators have mixed reactions. This article puts forward five lessons learned over seven years of online teaching in a diploma-level university history course. Many students in the course have low digital literacy, but they can overcome difficulties with their online study when given the opportunity and appropriate support. University management does not always recognise the extra time required to develop pedagogically sound and inspiring online lessons. Nonetheless, this space can be made to work for history educators and, moreover, it can provide a valuable and necessary opportunity for students who might otherwise feel alienated in an increasingly digital world.

post-COVID-19 world. The first step is to construct pedagogy that works for the students we have today, rather than the idealised student of 10 years ago. In this article, I want to share five lessons my colleagues and I have learned during the last seven years of delivering a very successful online-only history program to primarily older learners. This group presents many of the challenges we see increasing across the whole student cohort; our lessons in adaptive and inclusive design assist students with a range of diverse backgrounds and learning needs.
As the global population ages and universities branch out into diplomas, MOOCs, short courses and micro-accreditation, the number of people over 60 entering university study is rising. 3 Until recently, there was minimal research conducted about the motivations and outcomes for this cohort as they entered university, although there is a growing interest in educational gerontology (older adult education) in recent years. 4 Gerontological studies assumes an age over 65 in its subjects, but this article takes a loose definition of 'older learner' that starts at about 50 -'older' here means 'older than average for a commencing student' rather than 'geriatric'. As you will see, age is often less relevant than prior opportunity to learn digital skills.
It is sometimes assumed that younger students, as 'digital natives' who grew up in the digital world, will be confident navigating online learning platforms, but even they can struggle to transfer their skills to higher education learning management systems (LMS). 5 By targeting recruitment drives and offerings at digital immigrants (Generation X and above), universities are now picking up an increasing number of students with low computer confidence, or (in this context) low digital literacy. These students display high levels of anxiety, which in turn affects their satisfaction with the experience. 6 This article first explains the structure and teaching patterns of the course on which I teach, and then gives a summary of the growing popularity of family history and its relationship to broader historical studies. The second half of the article shares the five key lessons I have learned about instilling confidence in our older learners, and about teaching them online.  ', Computers & Education 50, no. 4 (2008): 1192, 1194 Background to the program Since 2016, the University of Tasmania has offered an online tertiary diploma in family history. Approximately 2000 students have graduated with a Diploma of Family History, with several hundred more expected to cross the stage this year. Eighty per cent of our students are women aged 50-70, many of whom enjoy their studies as a post-retirement activity. While many of these students have had professional lives, others tell us that they left school at 16 or have not been in formal education since high school 50 years ago.
I have been teaching in the family history program since almost its beginning, and over that time I have seen my colleagues responding to student confusion and feedback. We all attempt to ensure constant improvement in each iteration of the units, whether through large content changes or small tweaks to instructions. In my current role, I work with new unit coordinators to ensure continuity between the units in our program, and I draw on past experience and the rising field of educational gerontology to help them start from a firm footing rather than revisiting old trials and errors. The five lessons here cover the main themes I encourage new team members to consider, and they encompass the large issues we each try to address through ongoing adaptations. The lessons are the products of the common experiences of 10 to 15 different unit coordinators, lecturers and casual tutors over a period of seven years.
Each lesson has been generalised to represent the broad experience of the teaching team and students. Collecting these lessons has been informal; they come from endof-unit debriefs and troubleshooting. I am one of the longest-standing members of the program's teaching team and have observed for myself what others also noted. No example here refers to any individual student and all have been common across several years and groups of students, before and after COVID-19 became part of our teaching environment.
Four times per year the virtual gates of the Diploma of Family History are opened to a new term, and a fresh student cohort is welcomed in from across Australia. Where the traditional academic year is concentrated around two semesters, the Diploma of Family History comprises four terms, with two or three units running each term. Each term lasts for eight weeks: six weeks of learning materials, with a break week in the middle and a final week to complete assignments. The units fit comfortably into a four-term year and to complete the diploma, students must pass eight units. The number of enrolments can range from 100 to 600 in a unit, often depending on external circumstances (such as lockdown-induced boredom), but we plan for approximately 200 students in each unit.
Although each unit has its independent structure, and they are run by different disciplines at our university (History, English, Creative Arts and Media), all are built from the same blocks. The history units are called Introduction to Family History (run twice annually) and Convict Ancestors (both at foundation level), and Families and War and Migrant Families (first-year level).
The University of Tasmania uses the Brightspace LMS, customised to its requirements and called MyLO (My Learning Online). Each week, students have a set of teaching materials to work through, such as video lectures, readings, online activities and quizzes. Students work through the materials asynchronously, learning at their own pace. Some do a concentrated burst over the weekend, while others like to do a little bit each day. Generally, they are advised to plan for six to eight hours of work in the unit per week. 7 Each unit makes extensive use of discussion boards, with optional weekly or fortnightly discussions, and a very active 'Ask the Teaching Team' (ATTT) help board. Each unit has a teaching team with a coordinator, who is on contract or in an ongoing position, and several tutors who may be casual, contract or ongoingthis usually depends on who is available. For very large units, additional marking support is employed from a pool of experienced casual tutors.
Each member of the teaching team is rostered on to oversee ATTT during business hours. The coordinator and each casual tutor are allocated one or two discussion groups containing up to 80 students, and an appropriate workload to respond to any queries or confusion within the group discussions. The teaching team does not attempt to respond to every post in these group discussions, but will try to read everything and keep an eye out for issues that need direct attention.
Indigenous students have access to specialised teaching support, and we include cultural and trigger warnings where appropriate for specific materials. All students are also added into the 'Common Room' in MyLO, where they have social discussion boards, and access to more general family history resources, such as guides to reading old documents, referencing and technical help.
Different units use a variety of learning tools; in recent years, these have included H5P, Padlet, Feedback Fruits and PebblePad. Some of these tools, it must be said, are more successful than others. Some units teach specific technical skills: in the Oral History unit (run by our colleagues in Media), students are required to record an interview and upload an audio file and transcript for assessment, while The Photo Essay (Creative Arts) asks them to compile a collection of images and text that tell a story about their family history.
The typical student is a retired woman, who might introduce herself by saying she liked (or sometimes hated) history at school, and now finally has time to pursue her own personal histories. It is common for our students to lack confidence in using computers, and as those virtual gates open on Day One, they creep in, desperately trying not to break anything. These are the students who keep us busiest on ATTT. But, as I hope to show you, the most rewarding moments often come from engaging with these unsure students.

The rise of family history
Family history is the 'most popular "genre" of heritage' in Australia, particularly among the working and middle classes. 8 This rise in popularity of genealogical research over recent decades is the subject of an increasing number of books, articles and podcasts, including investigations into what attracts people to family history as a hobby or even a profession. 9 In their work on the psychology of family history, Australian researchers Susan Moore, Doreen Rosenthal and Rebecca Robinson found that the 'typical' family historian is an older woman who is well-educated and has a family of her own, although they note that family history is in no way limited to this 'typical' person. They identified a set of motives for people to become involved, including understanding one's own identity, seeking personal healing and keeping the mind active. 10 Among the various motivations they give, these three examples relate most closely to the motives I have heard most commonly expressed by our students. This last onethe cognitive benefitsis perhaps key to the 'typical' family historian. Something I often hear is that people have 'finally' been able to return to their interest in history after a long career, and are keen to keep their minds active in retirement. Moore et al. note that there is a lack of research into the appeal and benefits of family history as an intellectual exercise. They do, however, suggest that the prevalence of genealogical hobbies among older people is a strong indicator that practitioners find it beneficial to their mental agility. 11 Family history is a powerful entry point to broader historical interests, and while our diploma-level course is unique in Australia, nationally and internationally there is growing recognition of the place of family history and/or genealogical studies within universities. As well as our own new 300-level BA unit, Families in History, the University of Western Australia has recently introduced a unit called Who Do We Think We Are? Doing Family History, and internationally the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow) offers an MSc in Genealogical, Palaeographic & Heraldic Studies while Brigham Young University (Utah) offers a comprehensive undergraduate family history program.
At my university, we teach social history through the lens of individuals and families. Some students remain firmly fixated on their specific ancestors, but many start to read more widely and become more interested in the contextual story around 'their people'. As Ashley Barnwell and Tanya Evans have argued, the 'genealogical craze' is a movement that tells the stories of 'ordinary people'. 12 This contextual research is built into the historical units: for example, in Families and War students write a biography of someone who served in the First World War, but to get a good mark they need to include discussion about their subject's home community, the 'normality' of their subject's experience, or other surrounding circumstances.
It is often said that genealogy is the second-most popular web search after pornography, in which case the pool of potential genealogists-turned-social-historians is deep indeed. 13 Although there are few (if any) studies about the motivations for mature age students who enter a history degree, it has been recognised that humanities courses can be structured to provide foundation or pathway training for adults entering study from non-traditional backgrounds and that the humanities are attractive to marginalised people looking for further education. 14 It is also knownand I discuss this more shortlythat older learners enter higher education for one of the same reasons that they take up genealogical research: to keep their minds active. 15 What this means is that history sits at the intersection of several motives for nontraditional students to enrol, bringing with them lower rates of digital literacy and a lack of familiarity or comfort within university systems.
Moore and her colleagues found that family historians have a 'steep learning curve' to ascend to develop competency in all the skills that need to be second nature to a historian, including source analysis and drawing logical conclusions, but that many family historians take the acquisition of these skills very seriously. 16 Students enrol in our program after working on their family history for decades and are constantly seeking ways to improve their skills. Barnwell, Evans and Clark are among those scholars who have long advocated for family history to be taken seriously as a historical discipline, and the commitment of its practitioners to participate in all available training tells us that they want to be the best (family) historians possible. 17 We have seen success in using our diploma as a launchpad for new students, as they have often proceeded into the Bachelor of Arts from the Diploma of Family History. We have seen students continue into majors in Classics, History, and English, followed by History Honours, and even into a PhD candidature. Others complete our diploma as one of a number of courses they undertake across different organisations and higher education institutions in Australia and internationally. Anecdotally, our colleagues notice this latter kind of student when they teach them: they tend to be more talkative and confident in the online learning environment than their peers, but sometimes also struggle to adapt to differences in teaching design outside the Diploma of Family History.
Lesson One: the students are keen to learn and willing to engage In 2019, M'hammed Abdous examined student anxiety about adapting to online learning environments, and found that while female students show more anxiety, 13 For examples of this comparison, see: Barnwell, 'The Genealogy Craze', 261; Moore, Rosenthal and Robinson, The Psychology of Family History, 1; Maya Jasanoff, 'Our Obsession with Ancestry Has Some Twisted Roots', The New Yorker, 2 May 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/09/our-obsession-with-ancestry-has-sometwisted-roots-maud-newton-ancestor-trouble. 14 Janet Groen and Tara  they also tend to be more engaged and satisfied with the experience overall. 18 This is reflected in our students, who demonstrate very high rates of engagement: in 2021, Introduction to Family History had a low attrition rate of 7.3 per cent (only 26 out of 354 students either withdrew or ceased participating). Comparable data is not available for the same year, but between 2005 and 2019, our institution had an average adjusted overall attrition rate of 22.9 per cent for commencing students. 19 When technology-shy students enrol in any online unit, it is assumed that they want to be there and are willing to navigate the hurdles of this new learning environment. Perhaps this seems like an obvious point, but everyone who teaches this cohort must keep it at the front of their mind, because teaching online students with low digital literacy can be frustrating. They will get stuck before the first hurdle and ask seemingly basic questions such as how to create a new Word document or they will get confused by so-called obvious things such as browser tabs. The key thing, however, is that they will ask for help: they want to learn.
In 2006, Boulton-Lewis, Buys and Lovie-Kitchin found that key motives for older adults to learn included keeping their minds active, and engaging in 'self-reinvention'. 20 In examining MOOCs, Xiong and Zuo found that older adults were most often motivated to participate in these courses by a wish to solve personal problems through learning. 21 The results of both of these studies align with the motives for studying family history: 90 per cent of Moore's study participants said they want to 'find out more about who I am', while 34 per cent hoped to 'improve my selfesteem/sense of worth' by learning about the lives of their ancestors. 22 Our units are designed specifically to allow students to bring their own research to their learning. Each of the history units requires students to write an essay about their own ancestor or another person they have chosen to research. Most students will choose someone related to them, but some will not have anyone who fits the set criteriathey might not have a convict ancestor or relative who served in World War One. They will instead 'borrow' one from another student or choose a name at random.
What is curious is how narrow the parameters of 'self-reinvention' and personal problem-solving can be for family history students. The personal connection attracts them to study, but can also limit their enthusiasm only to subjects of direct relevance for their research. Each year, we receive some complaints about some of the units not being relevant to individuals because they could not apply the knowledge to their specific family tree. Where a generalist historian will relish the opportunity to learn about any event or place, that instinct does not always come easily to family historians. We have to convince them that the ultimate objective is for them to learn skills about source analysis and story-telling that they can later apply to their own research. The Boulton-Lewis survey did not focus on family history studentsthe researchers found participants through seniors' organisations across Australiasuggesting that 18 Abdous, 'Influence of Satisfaction and Preparedness', 41-42. 19 Department of Education, Skills and Employment, '2020 Section 15 Attrition, Success and Retention', Australian Government, 14 February 2022, https://www.dese.gov.au/higher-education-statistics/resources/2020-section-15attrition-success-and-retention. students who enrol in broader historical courses online may not have been enticed by the personal connection to their research subjects but are still motivated by the desire for self-improvement. 23 To date, our grading system has reflected this general motivation for self-improvement; although each unit awards ungraded passes (rather than a scaled mark), students receive comments and 'indicative' marks for assignmentsa numerical value to help students know where their skills sit. Students push themselves to improve, even though they know it has no impact on their final grade. In 2020 and 2021, levels of self-reinvention intensified as students told us how much value they placed in completing study and research projects as a distraction during COVID-19 lockdowns and isolation. The students demonstrated high levels of creativity in solving the research-related problems familiar to all historians: the shutdown of archives and libraries, or needing to cancel research trips. Rather than disengaging, the students demonstrated that the course was something they were passionately determined to continue, even if sometimes they could not complete assignments to a personal level of satisfaction because they could not access certain resources or information.
The Family History Common Room has a discussion board called 'Family History Wisdom', where students are encouraged to share their 'brick walls' (stubbornly unanswerable research points). This board is full of students baring their research souls and talking about brick walls they have been trying to break down for 30 or 40 years, or managing unpleasant family truths that have come to light. Family history is deeply personal and full of deep problems to be solved. What I see on a daily basis are students who want to be studying, who want to be learning.
Lesson Two: assume no prior knowledge and explain everything In designing teaching materials and assessment tasks, our policy is to over-explain everything. The level of detail included in instructions can appear excessive, but while older learners are capable of learning, they process information more slowly and less efficiently. 24 When students also lack digital confidence, the teaching team spends a large amount of time answering questions about processes rather than content. This is relevant to all disciplines: who wants to spend time teaching students how to save a Word file when we could be debating a big issue? It has been observed that 'historically, humanities teachers have been resistant to the notion of practicality in their courses'incorporating digital skills into our teaching is often seen as beyond our duties or not relevant to the subject. 25 That is the problem, howeverall too often we ask our students to run before they can walk. In an ideal world, our students would arrive with all the digital skills they need. But the reality is that they do not, and we have to choose between acknowledging that from week one, or spending time later trying to repair bad habits. Older learners have been shown to be more positive about step-by-step instructions and have a stronger preference for explanatory videos than their younger counterparts, and this informs our approach to developing how-to materials. 26 Before answering a question, it can be very important to break it down into parts. Questions can be simple: What is a browser? Can I use Google if I'm on a Mac? I keep losing webpages when I click on links, how do I get back to them?
Sometimes the answers seem so obvious that it can be tempting to consider the question foolish. It is useful to pause and consider what the student is actually asking. To this end, I find three specific questions helpful in formulating a reply or solution: What are the core elements of this question? What basic skills or knowledge are involved in the solution? What assumptions have I made about the student's understanding?
By asking these questions, I slow my own process down rather than rushing in with an answer that assumes pre-existing understanding. This breaks down the answer into multiple steps and allows for differences in cognitive processing between the teacher and the student.
Let me give an example. Referencing is part of every historian's world, and we usually use footnotes or endnotes, rather than an in-text citation system. For older students who are entering history degrees as a post-retirement passion rather than at the start of a career, many will be more familiar with in-text citations from their professional training. Others have never worked with any formal referencing systems, or only ever used endnotes. When setting assignments that require footnotes, we also present the challenge of learning a new system. Some students will seek help at the library, but others will not and will instead muddle along until they have it worked out.
Most word-processing software has a footnoting function, which will automatically number and organise references at the bottom of the page. In the early years of our Family History program, many students did not know about the existence of this tool or did not trust it to automatically update the footnote numbering. I will come back to this second issue in a moment, but will first consider the situation in which students were unaware of the tool's existence. When this happens, students manually create footnotes with superscript formatting and a cumbersome use of paragraph breaks. Understandably, these students get distressed and frustrated by how awkward this makes referencing.
My solution was to make an instructional video that walked them through the process using our preferred referencing style, including minute details like 'move the cursor (or mouse) to where you want a footnote, and click'. It is impossible to cover all the different word processors and versions used by students in each unit, so I included keywords to search online if they had difficulty finding the equivalent settings on their own computer. This video was accompanied by an illustrated transcript, with screenshots of each stage. Since introducing this video as a standard resource, the formatting of footnotes has improved to the point of no longer being an issue.
There are instructional videos available already, and YouTube is used for more advanced skills, but when explaining fundamental computer tools, it is more effective to make videos that target the specific problems we observe in our students' work. Our colleague Kristyn Harman has given some examples from Convict Ancestors, and in another instance, I developed a video lecture about using maps for family history. 27 Although the focus was on finding and interpreting maps, I included small tips about navigating maps as wellscrolling to zoom and click-dragging to navigate. For those students familiar with GoogleMaps, these may be self-apparent, but not all students have that knowledge or realise these were tricks common across the world of digital cartography.
Despite the best attempts to explain everything, students still struggle with the technological skills required to complete the units, especially at the beginning of their journey. As they master the basic skills and become familiar with the relevant systems, approximately 78 per cent stay with us after our introductory unit, requiring less assistance from the teaching and contact teams as they continue through more units. Research supports our commitment to over-explanation, showing that the more time students spend using their computers, the more confident and self-sufficient they become. 28 What I have not seen mentioned in the literature, however, is the impact of mistrust in technology. This is my third lesson.
Lesson Three: they will break things that cannot be broken It is important that the online interface is reliable and user-friendly, but also that instructions do not take any pre-existing knowledge for granted. Despite the years of experience covered in the teaching team, our students still manage to surprise us every term. Often, they are good surprises: fascinating archival discoveries or huge leaps in research skills. Occasionally, however, they are more bewildering surprises that have us scratching our heads. I am not mentioning these out of frustration or pettiness, but to reassure you that this is a common experience in teaching online. The most common of these bewildering surprises come when students 'break' technology and the teaching team cannot work out how. After seven years of incidental observations, our conclusion is that people who are not confident with computers lack an inherent understanding of their capabilities and standard practices. They perceive a problem and attempt to fix it, without understanding the underlying principles: they 'save as' each time they want to save their document because they want to see where their saves are or they are trying to circumvent the auto-save function (which they do not trust). Kathleen Schreurs and her colleagues summarised this problem by observing that the participants in their study of older learners often had 'awareness knowledge', but nothing more. This means they are aware of a function, but lack the understanding of how to use it or to troubleshoot problems. Such 'principles-knowledge', Schreurs et al. concede, is not necessary to use computing devices for everyday tasks. 29 What this study lacked was any discussion of how deep the crevasse between awareness and understanding could be, especially when accompanied by an eagerness to problemsolve when there is neither a problem nor a solution.
When designing pedagogy in an LMS, it is necessary to anticipate how the students will use it and to attempt to forestall any issues. Of course, this may not always be in our power to addressask any academic in any university and all will have complaints about the way their LMS works. We are, however, not entirely helpless and in the discipline of history we have the perfect opportunity to help students both immediately and in the long term. With different online repositories available to supplement our teaching, we have an array of 'sandpits' for students to play in while learning digital skills. The importance of building digital humanities skills into our courses should not be underestimated: in summarising the research on technology training, Kara Kennedy noted that students expect to graduate with digital literacy skills that prepare them 'for whichever path they choose to follow'. 30 I will come back to the social good of providing technological training to our students in Lesson Five, but for now I want to focus on Kennedy's next argument that connects student mistrust in technology with the privileged position we have in the humanities. Although trends are changing, technology has long been a field dominated by men (and remember that I am talking here primarily about older students for whom this has been the common experience). Kennedy suggests that by placing digital tools into humanities education, we remove it from its 'male-dominated context' so that it is more appealing to women. 31 In designing our online pedagogy, we assume that the aforementioned crevasse is not insurmountable, it just needs sufficient scaffolding. Those of us who use computers and the internet regularly have an almost unconscious understanding of common conventions: we know how to use a search bar, what filters do, and how to take a screenshot. We also know how to find instructions when unfamiliar tasks are required. These are all skills we have learned, but not everyone uses computers regularly before entering online study. Therefore, we include small tasks in each week that are neither compulsory nor assessed, but give students the chance to familiarise themselves with basic digital tools.
For example, we suggest that students find and share an interesting letter from the World War One frontlines printed in a local paper: this teaches them to filter and narrow their search on Trove Newspapers, and to sift through hundreds of results. Elsewhere, students look through the Internet Archive for recipes that their ancestors might have followed (and some even try the recipes and share a photo or review); in so doing they are testing the search and filter functions on a different interface, along with downloading or taking screenshots. While introducing them to Ancestry.com, we have several summaries of famous lives with gaps for the students to find answers to: 'What was Marie Curie's stated occupation when she sailed into New York in 1929?' These are low-stakes tasks that introduce a range of small skills that are important to succeed in historical research in an online world.
In planning each week's content, consider whether you can include a small task that will teach or refresh a skill while also keeping the student on topic. This can involve the dual requirements of imagination and patience as we attempt to second guess how students will try to use technology, but it can make life easier in the long run as it encourages confidence in the more technology-shy students. Eventually through scaffolded tasks, this confidence leads to the creation of what Ian Milligan has called 'digitally-aware' historiansthose who 'actively use technology rather than being shaped by it'. 32 They are trained to account for the benefits and disadvantages of the digital age, rather than relying on digitised resources without considering the processes that saw some documents digitised and not others.

Lesson Four: give the students space to help each other
Our greatest asset is the students themselves. They are eager to learn, and although most have busy lives, they demonstrate an enthusiasm for community that is not always seen among distance students. The students who enrol come from almost every background imaginable and include those who are isolated or lonely: farmers, carers, migrants, andespecially in a time of COVID-19increasing numbers of people who are intentionally isolating for the long term. This lesson is not only about the digitally illiterate; it is a defence of high-quality online teaching for the sake of all who cannot attend campus.
Following Wolf's argument that education for older people is 'essential for the civilisation' because it keeps them engaged and feeling able to contribute back into society, we create spaces for students to help each other. 33 When interviewing 21 older adults about how they learned to use their tablet devices, Tsai et al. concluded that most appreciated a combination of 'playing around' with a safety net of backup support from family or professionals. Some also learned or were inspired to learn by watching others, although it is noted in the study that older adults do not always have the same opportunities to observe that students and workers have in their daily lives. 34 We provide a version of this opportunity through the low-stakes tasks already mentioned; although students cannot watch each other or us complete them, they know that everyone else is looking at the same exercise and can seek help or advice if they are stuck.
The flexibility of older learners should not be underestimated. As discussed earlier, students will ask for technical help in the discussion boards. Staff members log in to find these questions already answered, with eager students sharing their own solutions. Variations on 'I had that issue too, but I tried this' arise, as students share their experience of experimenting with a tool to learn how to use it.
Every student has access to a set of unmoderated program-specific discussion boards to facilitate engagement and the feeling of 'usefulness' that Wolf emphasises. The 'meet-ups' board in the Common Room buzzes with students planning study sessions for students in the local area and upcoming graduates organising dinner after the ceremony. A note at the top of these pages provides contact details if something needs my attention and I look through the boards occasionally, although this is largely out of curiosity rather than any need to manage discussions. Students look after each other here, with more seasoned course participants offering enrolment tips to newcomers or making suggestions about breaking through brick walls. We are aware of Facebook groups that continue long after students have graduated and hear anecdotes of new friendships made during study with us. These students belie the anecdotal fear that teaching online prevents students from developing community. This is probably in part because of the nature of this cohortfamily historians tend to be curious and socialbut we have also worked hard across the whole program to create an environment that fosters collaboration and community. Students would like more synchronous interaction than we are able to provide, but in the meantime a supportive and friendly online environment encourages students to participate within their comfort levels.
In Lesson One, we saw their eagerness to learn, but in Lesson Four we see that this is not individualistic: they are eager for everyone to learn, not just themselves.

Lesson Five: what we are doing is important
The world is going online. Banks, government services and bookshops are increasingly reliant on channelling customers through their web interfaces and closing their low-performing physical shopfronts. Those users who do not have access to or confidence in using technology are subsequently being denied access to social participation and health services, leading to increased isolation or even financial detriment. 35 The benefits of using computers are recognised by older adults, particularly when they can connect that usage to improving their way of life. This includes the combining of computers and learning into online learningolder learners recognise the usefulness of this option. 36 This is a note of encouragement. It is important to remember that older students and digitally illiterate students who enrol in online learning want to be there, even if they know they do not have the necessary skills (Lesson One). We should applaud their enthusiasm and do all we can to make them welcome. In Lesson Four we saw the community that emerges from an intentionally planned online learning space, which draws in many of our most isolated students. Like loneliness, however, digital illiteracy can be found in all pockets of society and that is where I want to focus our attention in this lesson.
Being able to navigate this online world is not a luxury: it is a fundamental life skill, but it is not always treated as such. Rather than being an equaliser, Eynon and Malmberg have shown that the social and digital inequalities only grow bigger through informal online learning. 37 To counter that, we must meet the ability of our least digitally literate. This does not mean dumbing the materials down, it only means providing the opportunity for each student to build on their individual knowledge. In our program, this entails including links to more information and extensive instructions: students will self-select whether they follow the links or not, according to their need. There are always some who do not accept helpwe can only offer it.
In welcoming digitally illiterate students to online courses, we are playing an essential role in reconnecting them to their surroundings. I would even go so far as to argue that as teachers of history, we are being negligent if we do not ensure our students are equipped to use the technology that is now central to the production of historical research. In our course, students have to learn a lot of systems: an LMS, email, web searches, online archival searches, file downloading and uploading, forums and discussion boards, enrolment management systems, word processing and data management, to name just a few.
Some studies, such as those by Abdous and Sun et al., found that the use of digital orientation or a basic computer course was 'one of the most effective proactive strategies for easing students' transition into online learning'. 38 Our LMS and other university systems have standardised training and orientation, but many students prefer to learn through doing. As Tsai et al. noted, older learners are motivated by seeing a clear link between the skill and their daily requirements. 39 Most students enter the Family History program because they are interested in developing their own family history research skills, and the content is scaffolded to that goal. Therefore, students can immediately see the applicability of the skills they are learning. Most of those skills have a broader application than just family history researchfor example, by communicating enrolment information through email, students learn to receive and send emails. This equips them to email archives or rediscovered family members and improves their confidence in the wider world.
Students need the option of orientation to the learning platformthrowing them straight in at the deep end without support is counterproductive. 40 But not all students will engage with a formal LMS orientation. With a resilient support system, however, they will learn as they go. Some even comment about how satisfying they find it to conquer the challenge. With so much family history material now available online, it is near impossible to avoid using online payment systems to get copies of records, or screenshots to save digitised snippets while in the archives. Downloads and screen captures need to be saved to USB or emailed to the user and may come in different file formats. Images may need adjusting to be readable. The contents then need to be contextualised and read critically. None of these skills is unique to family history research, or even history generallythey are all fundamental functions in our online world.
In higher education, especially in the humanities, we like to talk about 'transferable skills'. These are precisely what our students take from our units: skills they can convert from incidental skills into full participation in a digitised world. Even if they do not go on to become historians or professional researchers, we have the opportunity to teach them how to engage meaningfully with online content. And, for the most part, that improves their quality of life. What we are doing matters.

Conclusion
On 24 April 2022, an ageing reader of The Guardian asked how to find their feet in an increasingly digital world. Agony Aunt Philippa Perry answered very sensibly, suggesting they go into a computer shop and ask for help: 'Explain that you are from another planet, another generation and you need proper help. This will be hard for them to understand because they are fish and the technology is the water, but persevere'. 41 In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous discussion papers and studies have examined the impact of the rapid migration to online teaching that many institutions around the world experienced. Several come to the conclusion that the speed of transition was not ideal but the process has demonstrated the value of online teaching. The authors encourage the long-term adoption of hybrid approaches if the nation's infrastructure supports it. 42 In line with our practice of encouraging active discussion boards, Lemay, Bazelais and Doleck found that it is important for us to address the 'social and affective dimensions' alongside delivering online content. 43 As with so much higher education research, these studies are primarily focused on younger students, and I await the arrival of surveys of older students who entered online education during the pandemic. I suspect that whether their studies had effective or ineffective social elements, many probably felt less isolated than had they not joined the classa sense of isolation is relative.
As universities pivot towards the online and digital spheres for teaching, there is a risk of excluding large swathes of our communities, and not only those who are olderthere are many reasons for people of all ages and backgrounds to have low digital literacy or confidence. It would be easy to write them off, to say there is no hope for such students, to argue that we should only be teaching content and that we should not have to teach basic skills as well. I get it. As you have seen in my five lessons, factoring in instructions for using basic tools adds complexity to a teaching plan. But seeing students gain confidence and find community as they learn this new language and reconnect with a world they thought they had lost access to is a tremendous reward. Lacking digital literacy does not equate to lacking intelligence, it merely indicates that someone has lacked opportunity. By allowing space for students to build up their skills and confidence while also learning about new ideas and themes, we are opening two new worlds at once for them: a world of higher education, and the infinity of the internet.
In reflecting on seven years of pedagogical practice and development, it has been encouraging to look back at our successes over that time and see how far our online teaching has come. There are still problems to resolve and as we continue to develop our methods, tools and approaches, it is inevitable that new questions will arise. There are also questions that merit further study. How does a mistrust of technology affect the attitudes of digitally illiterate learners towards online learning? What is best practice for increasing trust? Where is the line between too much and too little explanation, and how does that vary across different student cohorts? What makes one online group adopt discussion boards with enthusiasm, while another rejects the same discussion boards in another iteration of the same unit? As educational gerontology expands further into understanding older learners' relationships with technology, we will continue to improve our online pedagogy so that it is a welcoming space for all. I know we cannot please everyone and that our students are individuals with different motives for and approaches to learning. Ultimately, however, what we are all doing makes a difference in the lives of so many people. And that should encourage us to persevere.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the author
Imogen Wegman is a Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Tasmania, where she has been teaching in the Family History program since 2016. Her research uses digital methods to uncover the relationships between people and the land in early colonies.