Welcome to the second installment of The Quandary, The Chronicle’s occasional series to answer your questions about college life during a pandemic. The questions were posed by you, our audience, including members of our Facebook group Higher Ed and the Coronavirus. If you have a question, send it to fernanda@chronicle.com, or join our Facebook group and chime in.
How available should faculty members be to students?
Virtual office hours can help struggling students but shouldn’t be 24/7.
Online instruction raises new challenges, one being how much time an instructor should be accessible. Students may need more support during the pandemic, but instructors also have personal lives and other work to manage. From extending virtual office hours to fielding calls, texts, and emails on weekends, it can be hard to figure out where and how to draw boundaries.
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.
Adam G. Sanford, a lecturer in the California State University system, makes himself available to his students on Zoom for 20 hours a week, the time he normally would have been on campus, holding office hours and teaching his three in-person sociology classes. “I find that having this many open hours — even if the students don’t use them much — soothes my conscience a little bit,” he says, “that I’m at least doing the best I can to put myself out there and say, ‘Hey, the door is open,’ metaphorically speaking. ‘Come and talk to me.’” While he waits, he grades papers, does crafts, or watches TV.
Katheryn Eads, who teaches psychology at the College of the Florida Keys, is also holding office hours on Zoom, and her students have her cellphone number. They are welcome to call or text, she says, “as long as it’s a reasonable time of day.” If she’s not free to chat, she’ll try to arrange another time to catch up. “I’m hearing that we need to be flexible with our students, and they need to be flexible with us,” Eads says. But she tends to disagree with that second part, she says. “We need to be a rock for our students.”
That’s how Amy Stewart, who teaches business and computer courses at Northwest Mississippi Community College, feels, too. She asks students not to call after dark but has set up her office phone to forward to her cellphone. “It’s a few weeks of a sacrifice,” she says, “to get a student to the finish line.”
Of course, many faculty members are struggling, too. “We’re all in crisis,” says Peter P.C. Carlson, an associate professor of religion at California Lutheran University. “We cannot expect others to be superhuman for us. That does our students no favors.” He now holds two open office hours a week, just as he did on campus. When he’s not teaching class synchronously (virtually and live, during class time), he opens a Zoom meeting at the scheduled class time for any students to check in. Carlson also encourages students to set one-on-one virtual appointment times with him, and he corresponds with them individually via email. Still, he says, “I don’t want to give my students the idea that I would be available to them all the time. That’s setting up unrealistic expectations, and it’s not being fair to me.”
What can help on both sides are a professor’s “frequent, strategic, and highly visible appearances online,” recommends Flower Darby, a Chronicle columnist and director of Northern Arizona University’s Teaching for Student Success program. Spending all your time in one-on-one virtual meetings or email threads with students, she writes, “is absolutely not sustainable — or healthy.” One-to-many communications, she suggests, can go a long way to help students feel informed and supported.
How are colleges engaging students online?
As instruction has gone virtual, so must student programming.
Student engagement can be vital to motivation, performance, and a sense of belonging. It’s an essential part of the campus experience. The good news is that many events meant to enhance learning — like guest speakers and game nights — can be held online. And they can be done well.
When the University of Akron went remote, Anne F. Bruno, director of the student union, and her staff ran through their programming list to determine what they could and couldn’t offer online. Their rule of thumb was asking whether the event would maintain its original purpose. “As long as we kept the ‘why’ at the center of why you do these things,” she says, “then we’re holding onto our purpose of what we can deliver at this point in time.”
Online programs also don’t have to mirror the would-be in-person ones. For example, instead of holding the annual Greek leadership award dinner –– usually a two-hour event –– via video conference, Akron’s staff announced the winners daily on social media. While the announcements didn’t necessarily replace the traditional dinner’s special moments, the sense of anticipation created a memory, Bruno says, one of the most important elements of student programming.
Hearing feedback from students, asking them what types of events they want, and letting them help decide how to participate are key. It’s hard to read the room when students’ faces are scattered across the screen during a video conference. Sarah Lucas, assistant director of the Student Activities, Involvement & Leadership Office at Trinity College, in Connecticut, says she’s constantly asking students about their preferences and needs. Sometimes the question can seem small, like whether students want to play trivia games with randomly assigned teams or as individuals. But the adjustments matter, she says, to students’ willingness to participate.
Students at Emory University are taking the lead on some of their own virtual programming. “In this time of great chaos and confusion, we may find ourselves struggling with the loss of much of what made our lives here so vibrant,” wrote the arts students who started a public Facebook group to share their work. Intramural sports competitions are being held on video-gaming platforms, and the campus Buddhist Club leads a weekly meditation on Thursdays via Zoom.
The student-affairs staff has always tried to give students that kind of space, says Enku Gelaye, vice president and dean of campus life. “Long before Covid-19, they had a sense of what they needed to stay engaged with the community, what’s helpful, what’s meaningful.” Now, trusting students to set the agenda is more important than ever, she says: “turning to them for ideas, allowing their ideas to really take center stage.”
So how can other institutions cultivate that? Sometimes it’s simply getting out of the way, Gelaye says. Some staff members have helped students behind the scenes, on the technical details of videoconferencing platforms, for example, but the new virtual communities reflect students’ leadership.
