This article is excerpted from a new Chronicle special report, “The Future of Teaching: How the Classroom Is Being Transformed,” available in the Chronicle Store.
Come fall, will college students be bustling through campus hallways, taking their seats in classrooms large and small? Or will those halls remain quiet as students continue to log on and join class from their dorms, apartments, or homes? Or both?
Faculty members across the country are receiving different answers to those questions as administrators mull a “return to normal.” But many faculty and staff members are not sure what “normal” even means anymore. And is returning to normal even desirable, given the inequities and accessibility challenges that existed in higher education long before the pandemic struck?
As we look ahead to the fall of 2021, we have an opportunity to rethink not merely how to leverage online and hybrid learning to deliver content, but, more important, how to use the faculty’s growing expertise with technology to make teaching and learning more accessible for everyone.
According to survey data collected by Educause, the nonprofit whose aim is to improve higher education through IT, students in the fall of 2020 reported meaningful experiences across all learning environments — online, hybrid, and face to face. But their most-positive experiences depended more on the number of opportunities for student-instructor interaction than on the type of learning environment itself. How instructors and students organized and spent class time, and the amount of feedback and direct interaction, mattered more than the use of technology.
No doubt some degree of online and hybrid teaching will continue in 2021-22. And faculty members will still need institutional support to engage students in virtual classrooms. What does that support look like? And how might it differ from what institutions offered last fall? Here are a few key recommendations to consider:
- Focus less on the differences between synchronous and asynchronous instruction — and more on where, how, and why learning happens.
Over the course of the pandemic, higher education endured many heated discussions about whether asynchronous or synchronous teaching is “better” for students. Ultimately, it’s a fruitless debate. Evidence shows that some students benefit from real-time learning, while others do better working at their own pace. The fall-2020 Educause data showed that full-time students who lived on a campus preferred having some synchronous time in their online courses, while those who lived off campus with full-time jobs and/or families (not surprisingly) tended to prefer asynchronous online classes.
The bottom line: As long as online students have opportunities to check in with one another and with the instructor, it doesn’t especially matter if their interactions happen in real time or not — as long as they happen.
Shifting the focus from when to engage with students to how will open up deeper and more meaningful dialogues on your campus. Some faculty members might adopt what the online-teaching expert Flower Darby calls “roundabout design.” In contrast to “backward design” — in which courses are built working backward from a professor’s learning goals — roundabout class design encourages flexibility. Faculty members keep their learning goals in mind while adapting course materials along the way to meet the needs of the particular group of students in that semester’s class. Darby encourages instructors to ask themselves: “Why do I want students to engage in this task? Will it help them successfully meet my class goals? Or is it well-intentioned but not directly related to our overall purpose here?”
Asking such questions — instead of fixating on whether some element of a course should be done synchronously or asynchronously — will help faculty members more precisely identify and tell you the kinds of support they need for online and hybrid teaching in the months and years ahead.
- Develop a shared vocabulary for online and hybrid instruction.
One unfortunate consequence of emergency remote teaching in the pandemic has been tremendous confusion over the lingo. As The Chronicle’s Beth McMurtrie pointed out in a February 2021 Teaching newsletter, the term “hybrid” especially continues to confuse in light of the myriad options that colleges and universities are offering students for the time and location of their classes.
As we anticipate a fall semester in which multiple options for student learning may still be available, how do we avoid further confusion? By making sure your local definitions of “hybrid teaching” are widely understood, you will create common ground for campus conversations.
Faculty members shouldn’t just be talking with one another, or with administrators. They need to be in active conversation with staff members in educational development and technology offices. A clear vocabulary will help faculty members start to articulate what they are trying to achieve in an online or hybrid course (for example, how does the faculty member want students to collaborate with one another or engage with the professor online?). Technologists and educational developers can help faculty members identify the appropriate learning tools and solutions better if we’re all speaking the same language.
- Encourage a “less is more” philosophy about curriculum planning and development for online and hybrid courses.
During the pandemic, many instructors had to shorten their syllabi and cut beloved assignments or activities. For some, the cuts felt like losses. But they were liberating for others. As David Gooblar, an assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa, writes: “By carefully paring down the amount of material we read and discuss in class, it’s my hope that the content we do cover will be covered more deeply and will be more likely to leave a lasting impact.”
Maintaining what Gooblar called a “slimmed-down pandemic pedagogy” will indeed have long-term benefits beyond the pandemic. In the face of an uncertain fall semester, you can lower faculty stress and breed stronger teaching practices by encouraging them to adopt a “less is more” philosophy. Urge them to focus more on emotionally satisfying interactions with their online students and less on whether they’ve covered enough content.
Many academics may be worried about the prospect of having to juggle their fall teaching obligations and learn yet another round of new technical skills to teach in their institution’s technologically upgraded classrooms in the fall. Some may have to continue teaching both in person and online, giving students a choice about which way to attend class. In such cases, too, a “less is more” philosophy can reduce the stress of that workload. Rather than burn out trying to ready a textbook’s worth of content for multiple formats, faculty members need support to help them develop a handful of highly engaged activities that work across learning environments. That would go a long way toward reducing cognitive overload and improving satisfaction for professors and students alike.
- Advocate the principles of Universal Design for Learning.
One of the biggest benefits of hybrid and online learning: how easy it is to offer students different ways to engage with course content. As one simple example, short prerecorded lecture videos allow students to watch at regular speed or slowed down; they can listen or turn on captions to read along; or they can read the transcript of the video and not engage with the audio or visual elements at all. Those options benefit students with disabilities and those who work full time and can only attend classes asynchronously. But they also benefit all students, which is the goal of Universal Design for Learning. The idea, as described by James M. Lang, a professor of English at Assumption University and a Chronicle columnist on teaching, is for faculty members to “take the diversity of learners into consideration up front as we design our courses.”
The pandemic has revealed the importance of instructional options for a wide variety of students. Yes, many want to return to a physical classroom. But some don’t. Developing courses with the UDL philosophy in mind gives all students more choices about how they connect with course material. So long as lecture videos and other online options are paired with a subsequent interaction — class discussion or group work — the learning of content remains social and engaged.
Of course, as we have all discovered during the pandemic, creating those options takes time and effort. Educational developers and technologists will once again play a central role this fall in helping instructors explore and understand simple, campus-supported tools and infrastructure for creating content, distributing course materials, and fostering meaningful interactions with students.
As an April issue of The Chronicle’s Teaching newsletter notes, many instructors who prefer in-person teaching have nonetheless discovered valuable innovations in remote teaching that are “worth keeping” — the ease of bringing in guest speakers on Zoom, the benefits of virtual office hours, the advantages of more creative assessments (open-book exams or long-term projects rather than timed, multiple-choice tests). Such teaching innovations should continue to be explored and supported because online infrastructure for communicating and interacting with students is not going to disappear. Moving ahead, our focus needs to be on using technology to support faculty members and students, and make teaching and learning more accessible to all.
The often-unspoken truth of education in the internet age is that — as textbooks, learning materials, and assessments become increasingly digitized — all learning will, in some capacity, be “online learning.”
