By Courtcourtwest – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37141280

BY AARON BARLOW

For the last few days, I have been immersed in responding to student papers and to their comments on my courses’ online platforms. This has caused me to think anew about what I have learned over the past decade of how students need to be responded to online as compared to in the classroom. And, of course, to consider how they should be treated in crisis situations.

And that is… differently.

What we have learned about teaching from experience in classrooms cannot be transferred wholesale to online learning environments—nor is it useful to even try when the world outside has suddenly gone topsy-turvy.

Though I do, indeed, feel that much of the instruction happening online (even before coronavirus) is but a pale imitation of classroom teaching, the digital can be effective. But only when the instructor understands that content needs to be approached differently, as do students themselves. And, though I may not prefer it, the digital can serve as a means for furthering education even when forced to stand alone.

But… to make this happen as we change from the classroom to the digital, we also need to change our pedagogical assumptions in terms of how they relate to content and its mastery but particularly of how they relate to treatment of students.

Without face-to-face interaction, our relationships with students change. Without the specific schedule of classroom appearance, student attitudes change. Without the subtle interplay of interaction between students, classroom dynamics change. In light of this, everything we do, pedagogically speaking, needs to change.

In particular, and first of all, we need to be extremely careful in the tone we take with students when working with them online. It is extremely easy for a student to misconstrue what we write for they don’t have the facial cues available when we talk. This extends even to conversations on Zoom, etc., for the visual information there is limited in comparison to a face-to-face situation. Sometimes in the classroom, a harsh tone can be effective; online, the drill sergeant is not. We no longer have a captive audience and cannot treat our students as such.

Students will simply turn us off if we treat them harshly online. This doesn’t mean that we have to baby them or lower standards—but that we need to find alternative ways of moving them to meet those standards, ways that do not rely on authoritarian stances. We have to become real leaders, finding ways of convincing our students to follow is that don’t require the threat of punishment (that is, of low grades). This is hard for most of us (it certainly is for me) but acting in any other way will allow too many of our students to simply drift away. We have to inspire dedication, acting as individual advocates for our students. A real task, and one not all of us are prepared for (though we, too, can learn).

In the past, some have liked to divide teaching roles between “the sage on the stage” and “the guide on the side.” Neither works well online. The former devolves into MOOCs and TED Talks, often more entertainment and preening than the necessary core of learning and coursework. The latter stalls into inactivity, for the motivation on the student’s part dwindles when the guide is not also a leader. The binary, which was simplistic in the first place, is useless online—even when translated into synchronous versus asynchronous online approaches. We need both and neither.

Nothing works extensively online when simply presented. Yes, there are students whose interest and curiosity is already piqued, who can negotiate presentations for their own benefit, but the majority need more than that. Few students can really become autodidacts. They need to be part of something, to feel their contribution—even their own learning—is valued. It’s easy to provide that when we can look them in the eye unmediated; it is difficult at a remove. We teachers must recognize that in online situations, tailoring our responses to students away from the negative and to the motivational. And we must work to build online community and enthusiasm.

Many of us resist this, for we begin to feel like Dr. Pangloss, extolling the best of all possible worlds even as we lose, metaphorically, our body parts. We feel like the hypocrites who claim that anyone can be whatever they want to be, that every one of our students can be a leader. We feel like cheerleaders, not teachers. And that is not what we signed up for.

Few of us became professors because we wanted to work online—or even because what we really want to do is teach. For the most part, we take on teaching tasks as a trade-off for the privilege of involvement in the scholarship that drew us to academia in the first place. We learn to teach through the examples of our own teachers and not through serious study or even guidance. It is assumed that we can teach and, after a time, we buy into the assumption—as though experience equals skill.

Sometimes it does. But even the most skillful of us in the classroom has a lot to learn when we try to transfer our teaching to online situations–where most of us are neophytes. Just because we have been successful in the classroom, we cannot assume that we will succeed in its digital equivalent.

There’s a lot we all need to learn, for the digital is going to remain an enhanced part of our teaching even when we return to our classrooms. Frankly, all of us professors should have been proficient in online teaching before now. After this, digital skills will be considered neccesary and fundamental.

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As we start to learn to teach effectively online, there are a number of directives we should keep in mind:

1. Be a learner. Because we were effective in the physical classroom there’s no reason we should assume we are just as good online.
2. Be supportive. Try to avoid being judgmental. Yes, judgment is part of our instructional duties, but we need to establish ways of doing it that also provides a path to improvement. Never cut off that path; never let a student believe that they are mired in mediocre performance.
3. Be incremental. Scaffold your assignments toward specific goals reached by smaller steps than you have in the past. This doesn’t always have to be explicit to students, but we should be aware of the small steps of improvement and provide reinforcement at each. If possible, brush up on the old Mastery concepts that allow for clear student understanding of what accomplishments add up to what grade–and on Fred Keller’s Personalized System of Instruction.
4. Be efficient. This has been difficult in the sudden transition to online learning we’ve just gone through, but we can start it now, responding almost immediately to student queries and comments. This keeps students from setting aside the tasks for our courses in favor of other demands on their time.
5. Be available. The traditional office-hours concept does not translate well into digital environments. Make students aware that they can contact you at any time even if you restrict the hours for phone and video calls. Email and text and contact through online platforms should not be restricted.
6. Be flexible. Not everything you ask will be possible for every student, certainly not in a time of crisis like the present. Revise deadlines in individual cases and even rework assignments as necessary for differing situations of accessibility and even disability. One size, even one standard, does not fit all—and needn’t. Learning happens at different paces and different levels even when the goal is singular.

We professors tend to dogmatism. Though we may be politically progressive, we are almost always academically conservative, sure of ourselves in our appeal to what has worked in the past. But the past is gone, so we need to add one more thing to the list:

7. Be open. What we have assumed and what has worked in the past may not be the best option today, especially in the face of the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic. We all need to be willing to change, and able.