  As more and more face-to-face classes move to online environments, it becomes
increasingly important to explore any emerging barriers to students' learning.
This work focuses on characterizing student barriers to active learning in
synchronous online environments. The aim is to help novice educators develop a
better understanding of those barriers and prepare more student-centered course
plans for their active online classes. Towards this end, we adopt a qualitative
research approach and study information from different sources: social media
content, interviews, and surveys from students and expert educators. Through a
thematic analysis, we craft a nuanced list of students' online active learning
barriers within the themes of human-side, technological, and environmental
barriers. Each barrier is explored from the three aspects of frequency,
importance, and exclusiveness to active online classes. Finally, we conduct a
summative study with 12 novice educators and explain the benefits of using our
barrier list for course planning in active online classes.
