For professors, moving to remote teaching in the face of a global pandemic has ruptured the semester. While the shift has raised new questions, like which online tools are best for a particular course, it’s also reignited old debates, about the best way to grade; about what grades even are. It’s exacerbated most challenges students face in their lives beyond the classroom — and made it harder to ignore how those challenges can inhibit academic performance.
As they try to sort through the practical and philosophical matters of stitching their courses back together, professors might be looking for a place to talk. They might even be looking for community. That’s what Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel figured when they decided to start holding “open, online office hours” for instructors weekly, on Fridays.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Morris, a senior instructor in learning, design, and technology in the University of Colorado at Denver’s School of Education & Human Development, and Stommel, a senior lecturer and digital-learning fellow at the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia, are longtime collaborators. Their plan, as they wrote in a post introducing the office hours, held for the first time on April 3: “We don’t promise answers, but we will work with those who show up to find creative, compassionate, generative solutions — and likely more questions.”
For the first session, some 20 educators — mostly professors, but also a handful of schoolteachers — joined a videoconference for about an hour. Their discussion — which felt like a low-key gathering of like-minded colleagues — ranged widely, covering topics such as which specific online tools to use and how to persuade colleagues to be understanding of students. But it coalesced around two main themes: the utter weirdness of teaching in this format, and the great challenge of caring for students during a crisis.
Disembodied Yet Intrusive
Like other teaching experts, Morris and Stommel have emphasized that what professors are doing now is not “online learning” — which is, after all, an entire field with its own research and best practices. What’s happening right now is something different: Call it “remote instruction” or a similar phrase. Today’s remote instruction wasn’t designed as much as cobbled together under duress. Professors are turning to tools — videoconferencing, in particular — that they might not have used had they built an online course from the beginning.
Even for experienced online instructors, remote instruction is disorienting. Professors and students may have held their last face-to-face meeting without knowing it. They might not have gotten to say goodbye.
“Basically, you’re finding yourself on a desert island with your students,” Morris told the group. “And you’re asking: What are our resources?”
Many professors turned to Zoom or other videoconferencing programs because they seemed like the closest approximation of in-person interaction. But professors spent a good portion of the office hour commiserating about the many ways in which it’s not that close. Being on a videoconference, they’ve found, is at once a disembodied yet intrusive experience.
Holding class on a videoconference raises questions — both practical and ethical — about what professors and classmates can see and hear.
Marnie Bullock Dresser, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville Richland, said that one part of her reluctance to use live video was that “I didn’t want anyone to see my house.” Students, she added, may well share that discomfort: “They have even less control about where they are.” Already, she’s seen students log in from a closet and a well-trafficked hallway. As a compromise, she said, she’s held check-ins with students on Zoom but kept them short, telling students, “I miss you, I want to see your faces.”
Then there’s the question of whether to keep students’ microphones on or ask them to mute themselves. Teaching without any ambient sounds, one participant wrote in, feels like speaking to an empty room. But when everyone in a meeting is unmuted, it can be difficult to gauge whose turn it is to speak. And that ambient noise can be distracting, especially if it involves, as one muted participant noted in the meeting’s chat window, “children screaming.”
Another challenge of live video, of course, is that students might not be able to join at their usual class time. Professors can record their sessions for students to view later, but that raises privacy concerns about who can view the recording. And watching a live video after the fact can be disengaging, Stommel said. A better option, in his experience: Hold live discussions on a platform on which students type, rather than speak, their contributions.
Pedagogy in a Crisis
As difficult as it’s been to get some semblance of a college course off the ground in a new format in a matter of days, remote instruction is not the biggest challenge in many students’ lives right now. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic and an unfolding economic collapse. Students may be worried about their health and safety, or the health and safety of loved ones. They may be in financial distress, or in the midst of a mental-health crisis.
Autumm Caines, an instructional designer in the Hub for Teaching & Learning Resources at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, said that faculty members should “respond with flexibility, hospitality, and care.”
Some students are always experiencing a crisis, Caines said. “It’s just now all of them are in crisis, all at the same time.”
Anne Marie Francis, an assistant professor of English at the University of North Georgia, typed a related point into the meeting’s chat field. The universality of the pandemic, she wrote, presents an opportunity to connect differently with students because “I am in the middle of it with them.”
Students are also grieving, another participant noted. They’re experiencing the dissolution of everything familiar.
For some students, Morris added, college had been the one thing holding their lives together. “My personal approach,” he said, “would be actually to recognize with students the loss.”
Students might not be ready to talk about those feelings, Stommel said. Or they might not want to talk about them with a professor. He explained that he will sometimes describe his own feelings and mention what students might be feeling, as a way to talk about it without putting them on the spot.
Being on campus, seeing friends, participating in extracurriculars — for students, for now, most of what makes up the college experience is gone. “What’s left of school,” Morris said, “is you. What’s left is the teacher. You become college to them.”
