BY AARON BARLOW

What concerns me, as we move into an educational situation where all teachers are going to have to be prepared, of necessity, to shift from face-to-face to online teaching situations, is that we are being asked to forget about our skills in one as we make a transition to the other. We are deemed competent to teach online once we have completed training in managing online platforms. This training, to add insult to injury, is generally developed by people who are themselves only proficient in the educational technologies that have been developed for teachers. This is training, therefore, that only makes us able to use the technologies but that never explores the questions of why these systems are set up as they are or what, exactly, they provide the students. They don’t make us better teachers, simply more proficient manipulators of online tools.

One of the oddities of this training is that it rarely involves the students, not in any direct fashion. Most of us who are college professors learned to teach by being in classrooms with students. This may not be the best way, but it does keep us directed toward those who benefit from out activities; when we fail, we see it in the eyes of our students.

When we take courses to certify us for online teaching, we focus our attention on our own online teachers. When we fail, we see it in the numbers on a screen. Students, as we discover as we learn to manage the platform, are no longer people but are a homogenized “they” understood only though digital curtains—rarely opened.

Not only are we asked, in most online teaching programs, to cast aside the knowledge we have gained in actual teaching, we are told (implicitly, at least) that we can’t to this or that because of the limitations of the software and should leave development of online teaching methodologies to those who know more than we do (something we would never accept in our face-to-face classrooms). At the same time, we are asked to ignore our own experiences as students gaining certification in digital teaching. After having seen just how bad most online learning is, we are expected to go online ourselves with the idea that we are simply to follow directions, not to try to change things.

Yet, we certainly can make use of technology in ways that are quite different from what we are taught as we are brought to mastery of the platforms. We are seeing this, though rarely from the technologists, from teachers who try to make the platform not as a series of cages but as a part of something much stronger. There are many people doing this. Two ways are through the use of video, which has some success and a great deal of failure, and though the development of lateral communication between students, communication that is often beyond the control or even oversight of the teacher but that bring students themselves into greater agency.

Most teacher do know that students respond best to a face or even a voice so try to invest their online classes with a sense of personality. For the most part, unfortunately, we tend to do this without thinking clearly enough about what we are expecting our students to get of posted videos or from synchronous meetings. I recently watched a training video that provides an example of how a teacher might use a short video as an introduction to students. The first thing the teacher did was talk for a moment or so about how long it had taken him to get used to recording himself. I think the idea was to put the students at ease, to show that all of us are uncomfortable, at first, creating videos. But why? Most of our students have grown up with smartphones and have been video-chatting for years. Maybe the teacher was trying to put the students at ease, but he might have done something that would have been quicker and funnier, something a colleague had told me about but had not kept in a video she had been making—she had spilled a cup of coffee. The instructor in this video moved on from his leaning to show off the equipment he had in his apartment and then to show off his pets. By that point, I was ready to turn the whole thing off. Instead, I went back to the beginning to count the number of times he used “I.” I gave up after reaching a dozen early one. Yet this very simple idea is a good one and needs to be explored–by teachers. It cannot be simply put out there but needs to be explored by serious students of education.

This instructor was on the right track but had not designed his video with the students in mind. He knew that he needed to establish human contact with his students but did not do it on a careful plan. He needed to think first about what he wanted his student to retain and to do—and needed to find a way of accomplishing that in a couple of minutes. He wanted them to retain an image of him as a teacher who could be trusted and, in the case he was trying to demonstrate, to get his student to post their own videos. Doing this, as I said, requires pedagogical smarts and not just command of the technology.

A colleague of mine mentioned, with some surprise, that few of her students have their videos turned on during Zoom sessions. If she had been thinking in terms of her students as much as I know she does in the classroom (she’s an excellent classroom teacher), she would have immediately realized that the students may not have been dressed to be seen and may not have been proud of where they were. Just as we do in the classroom, we need to be constantly thinking of our students and what they are doing, not about what we are providing them and now nice it looks but always asking just what they are going to get out of this and what they are going to do in response.

Ask yourselves: if we are bored by the online training we have to go through, how on earth are we to expect that our students will put up with much the same thing?

Because we do have to set up whatever pieces are necessary on our particular platforms for our classes, we tend to create our classes much more diligently before the semester starts than we do with our syllabi and notes. Sometimes it can even feel like we just have to wind the whole thing up on the first day of classes and let it go. After all, no matter how much we try—it can seem—there’s little we can change one the class has gone live. Students just have to go through the motions to the end. Yet we should also be developing alternative pathways a the semester continues.

Because we don’t see the students, we don’t tend to pay as much attention to them online. At the same time, we don’t often feel that the platforms provide us with sufficient and malleable tools for changing things up if they are not working so begin to feel that we are doing little more than clerical work especially as we are unable to see the student agony behind the results so are not as likely to be searching for a new way as we are in face-to-face situations.

For the most part, we are forced to work with the machinery instead of with the students—which often bores us as much as it does the students. And the students seem to feel they have no agency of their own in the classes. They are simply sifted through. Because of the structure of online instruction, their students become more removed from their classes than ever and they have no ability to influence the movement of the class. This situation only gets worse when online teachers are not allowed to design their own classes but are simply asked to ‘facilitate’ (in a perversion of Freire’s use of the word) online instruction prepared by someone else.

One of the things we do in our classrooms is to get students working with each other, in pairs or small groups. To work laterally, so to speak, rather than just in response to classroom hierarchy. The platforms try to approximate this but it doesn’t work—in part because the teacher can ‘listen in’ to anything on the platform. Students don’t seem to have any private ways of communicating with each other. They shouldn’t share their phone numbers or email addresses on the platform and they aren’t likely to ask their teacher to get them in touch with other students.

There are a number of strategies for countering this, including developing tasks in pairs and the teacher privately sharing campus email addresses with each pair. Then another task would follow with none of the students paired with the same first one. A third task, and each student would have at least three others to contact privately and could probably reach most of the class through the network, along with postings on the platform which would make the names of each known. Soon, most of the students would be able to reach most of the class—probably through chat, their most favored medium these days. Doing this, with continued pairing or small-group activities, could not only make the students less alone in the class but could even make them feel powerful enough, as a group, to approach the teacher about something they don’t like.

These are a few simply things that can be done as we move into online situations for this summer and this fall. Many of us could be preparing over the summer for taking what the technocrats are ‘giving’ us and making it into something that can be more useful than the courses our students are, quite frankly, hating this semester. It’s likely that we won’t be back into the classroom for good, not even next January, so it is in our best interest as the faculty to be taking our own knowledge and use it in ways that can take our classes far beyond with are now being provided for us.

Just as we want out students to feel ownership of the classes they are taking, we should feel that, too.

Rather than just taking pre-designed courses, we should be involved in the design.

Our students, too.