Laurie Schreiner had long been skeptical of online learning. Schreiner, a professor of higher education at Azusa Pacific University who is in her 38th year of teaching, thought that online courses were impersonal — and that colleges offered them primarily as a way to make money.
Then, like her counterparts across the country, she was suddenly forced to teach online when colleges moved to emergency remote instruction this past spring.
It went a lot better than she’d expected. While Schreiner still believes from decades of experience that there’s something special about teaching in person, she found that teaching online stretched her as an instructor and led her to refine her practices.
That’s in keeping with what other professors have found, said Mike Truong, digital-learning architect and executive director of the Innovative Teaching and Technology office at Azusa Pacific. Online courses, Truong said, are built by closely linking activities, assignments, and assessments with learning outcomes. There’s no way for professors to walk in and wing it — they have to plan. This is how instructional designers think, Truong said, and “that’s now becoming almost an essential mind-set that faculty have to adopt.”
No one would wish the past five months on anybody. Instructors first had to move their courses online, then they spent the summer designing courses that could work in several formats — work that often went unpaid. They supported students, who faced a host of material and psychological challenges. They read between the lines of their colleges’ reopening plans and questioned administrators’ judgment. They worried about their livelihood, their students, and their safety. It has been an ordeal, and it isn’t over.
The tumult had another effect: It prompted many professors to rethink the way they teach. They’ve pared down assignments, covered less content, spent less time lecturing, given more-authentic assessments, and provided more flexibility around grades. They’ve decided what’s most essential for students to get from a course and found a way to make it possible. Those changes were made under duress. But in many cases, professors have found, they turned out to be improvements.
Will those changes persist whenever college teaching gets out of crisis mode? The answer will depend on the commitment of individual professors, sure — but also on how well their institutions support them.
A Widespread Reckoning
Good professors tinker with their teaching all the time. Some can point to an epiphany that sparked a larger change, like realizing that their students weren’t learning as much as expected, or that there were systemic inequities in students’ performance — or just discovering a different way to teach and deciding to try it.
Such changes often happen idiosyncratically, as important moments in individuals’ journeys as educators. This spring, however, professors had to reckon with their teaching en masse. Consider: Just about every professor who was teaching in person — including lots who never wanted to teach online — suddenly had to deliver their courses remotely, midway through the term. This meant, in many cases, learning new technologies and getting a crash course in online pedagogy.
The spring, and especially the summer, saw a surge in professional development around teaching, a good deal of it informal. Colleges’ teaching-and-learning centers held virtual office hours and gave condensed training sessions in online-course design. Groups focused on pedagogy held gatherings on Zoom, experts wrote advice articles, networks formed to let instructors share ideas — and simply commiserate.
Matthew Nusnbaum had taught online before, and when the pandemic arrived, he became a point person for colleagues in the biology department at Georgia State University, where he is a senior lecturer. The department is large, Nusnbaum says, with about half of the members tenured or on the tenure track, and the other half lecturers focused entirely on teaching. Professors were all over the map in terms of their technological prowess and how focused they were on undergraduate education, he says.
A core group of department members who had more experience teaching online set up regular Webex videoconferencing sessions — at one point two or three a week — to teach their colleagues different things they could do in the university’s online-learning system, he says. That’s a great deal more discussion of teaching than usually occurs among members of a department, especially at a research university. “One of the things that I was super proud about with our department was seeing the level of collegiality that came out of this crisis,” Nusnbaum says.
There were broader university efforts underway, too. Georgia State’s leadership was already making investments in online education before Covid-19, Nusnbaum says, and when it hit, the university’s teaching center ramped up an existing program on mastering online teaching and urged everyone teaching online or blended courses in the fall to take it. More than 3,000 of them did.
Then in the summer, the university’s college of arts and sciences had online ambassadors — Nusnbaum among them — available to help faculty members who were teaching online. Through that program, Nusnbaum was in touch with 40 to 50 professors, and held a regular meeting that was attended by a smaller subset of them, 10 or so. That meeting, he says, “almost became an emotional-support group.”
“I hope that we’ll be able to continue individualized and personalized opportunities like that,” Nusnbaum says.
Deeper Thinking
Some of the changes professors have made in response to Covid-19 are ones that teaching experts have long encouraged. “Those same faculty could have or may have attended a million workshops on writing good exam questions and authentic assessment,” says Nancy Chick, director of the Endeavor Center for Faculty Development at Rollins College, who views assessment as an area that’s particularly ripe for lasting change. “And then they go back to their offices and they’re too busy.”
Pandemic teaching forced professors to follow through on those recommendations, says Chick. Once they did, they could see the evidence of how a different form of assessment benefitted their own students — not simply students in general. After professors learn that an alternative assessment results in deeper thinking and greater learning, Chick says, they’re a lot less likely to go back to what they were doing before.
That’s what happened to Lee Lines, a professor of environmental studies at Rollins. Lines, who’s been teaching for 24 years, says his teaching is “constantly evolving.” Still, he usually gave traditional, timed, closed-book exams.
Those exams asked students to do a mix of things, Lines says: explain terms, apply concepts, compare and contrast ideas, and write an essay evaluating an argument. Lines also thought it was important for students to recall and describe key details they had learned in his courses, and he wrote questions that required them to.
After his courses moved online, Lines overhauled his exams to make them open book and essay-based. He also gave students more time — 48 hours, usually. As a result, testing students’ memory of key details no longer made much sense, so he didn’t. That meant replacing questions that asked students to recall information or define terms with ones that asked them to apply what they knew.
Lines wasn’t sure what to expect. What he found: “I got back some of the best exams I’ve ever gotten.” Students’ writing was better, Lines says, their thinking deeper. He gave students more time, and they used it well.
“Sometimes when you give an essay exam, you get a sense that what students are doing, they come into the exam and their heads are filled with lots of information, and they’re sort of ticking off the key points that you might be expecting to see,” Lines said. With more time, students instead synthesized ideas and wove together cohesive responses, he said, demonstrating a deeper understanding of the material. They moved from trying to give Lines the answer they thought he wanted to producing their own pieces of writing.
Lines expects that he’ll keep giving take-home exams with more difficult essay questions in the future now that he’s seen his students rise to the challenge.
New Routes to Relevance
After courses moved online in March, Ria Banerjee changed her assignments, in part to minimize the risk that students might cheat. Among the things Banerjee, an assistant professor of English at Guttman Community College, in the CUNY system, tried: using a creative-writing assignment to assess students’ understanding of a reading.
Typically, for her course on colonialism in 20th-century literature and film, Banerjee assigns a theoretical reading that students tend not to like but that she thinks is necessary to give them a grounding for the other material they will read. This time, instead of using a traditional writing assignment to gauge their comprehension, she asked students to write a dialogue between two philosophers whose views were covered in the reading. Students were much more engaged in the reading than usual, Banerjee found, with some conducting additional research about their philosophers, even though she hadn’t asked them to. She plans to keep this kind of assignment in the mix going forward.
Professors have definitely been pushed by the pandemic to improve their pedagogy, Banerjee says, but it’s hard to feel good about it given the larger toll — which has been especially heavy for community-college students in hard-hit New York. “Whatever you can name related to Covid that has happened,” she says, “has probably happened to my students.”
Events outside the classroom further upended her course early this summer, as the Black Lives Matter movement took off after the killing of George Floyd. (Guttman’s spring term goes into June.) “Students were asking me why they should not be at a protest, and finish their homework,” Banerjee says. It struck the professor as “an extremely fair question.”
From the start of the semester, Banerjee had been teaching about anti-capitalism and anti-racism, so she was taken aback when students weren’t convinced that the course was relevant to what was happening around them. Despite her initial surprise, she says, “I think it made my teaching better that my students were not willing to accept what I was putting down.”
Some students also questioned whether moving forward with plans to transfer to a four-year college made sense in the face of everything else going on. “Why should we even bother?” they wondered.
Her answer, in part: Activism can take many forms, and taking control of one’s education — and finding meaning in it — can be one of them.
“There are many, I think, good reasons why everyone should be bothering,” Banerjee says. “But it’s one thing to have those arguments in my own head, and another thing to actually try to be convincing to a group of young people who are really scared, and sick, and have dealt with a great deal of loss and on top of that there are these man-made, nonsensical, extreme racism events happening in their lives.”
Those forces may have hit Banerjee’s students especially hard this spring, but they’re touching the lives of students everywhere. The way professors respond to that reality in their courses could make a big difference in how much students are able to learn during another trying semester. And it might just shape the way those professors approach their teaching in the future, too.
