The spring of 2020 will not be the semester that goes down in history as an example of higher education at its best. In mid-March, the novel coronavirus forced colleges and universities to pivot from in-person course delivery and traditional on-campus experiences and thrust them into a modality of remote instruction.
Many amongst the educators—and those being educated—complained and grumbled. “Students aren’t engaged,” or “I can’t tell if they are cheating” were among the most-common refrains from faculty. “Our education management platform and I don’t get along” was another. As we quickly found out, students were dissatisfied with the caliber and content of the remote teaching, too. To a great extent, much of these complaints from both sides could have been avoided had the change need not have been required, in essence, overnight.
I am a longtime educator at La Salle University, where our leadership extended spring break by one week to afford professors an opportunity to prep themselves and their courses for a transition to remote instruction. Not every college or university made this effort. Had there been the opportunity to train the educators how to teach online and prepare the students to be knowledgeable consumers of online education, the experience could have—and should have been—quite different. But because the unplanned experiment received mixed reviews from both sides does not mean that online teaching need not be revisited. In fact, many colleges and universities—including La Salle—are planning for a return to on-campus instruction for a Fall 2020 semester that will combine face-to-face and online instruction modalities. This summer, workshops offered by our De La Salle Institute, along with instructional designers and library staff, are easing this important transition.
Almost 20 years as a full-time, face-to-face teacher of both undergraduate and graduate students—and six years running as teacher in and director of a totally virtual master’s program—has taught me a thing or two about both pedagogical models. And while I continue to surprise myself every time I say it, I have developed a preference for virtual teaching. I would encourage my peers to think differently about this opportunity for skill acquisition, especially as public health experts are forecasting several waves of COVID-19 cases. Adaptation to what could be a new normal will be critically important for academics and students, alike. Done well and done right, virtual teaching is so much more challenging and far more time consuming for the faculty member than is face-to-face teaching, but the educational benefits to the students are exponentially greater.
Within the realm of online teaching, remote and virtual teaching are different animals. A professor might be OK with remote teaching, where the only difference is performing in front of a camera to a class of students each watching from their respective personal space. The students can all see the professor and the professor can see all the students, and everyone can interact with everyone. This is the version of online teaching that says, ‘Just add a camera and, poof, you have online teaching.’ It is without a doubt the weaker form of online teaching. Unfortunately, because there was no or insufficient lead time to move from face-to-face teaching to online, most institutions of higher ed were forced into remote teaching. It is no wonder why students were dissatisfied.
Online teaching, when done well and right, is virtual teaching, and it is vastly different from what many experienced this past semester. It dismisses the need to be in class at a specific time on specific days and banishes the ideas of listening to long, boring lectures from the same person, class after class, with minimal interaction with classmates and infrequent classroom discussions that are often painful to elicit and stop with the end of that class. Instead, virtual teaching allows for a mixture of sources, perspectives and media to convey knowledge, from the professor to videos to TED Talks—with sustained conversations. While face-to-face and remote teaching are controlled by the clock—each class starts and ends at a specific time—virtual teaching is controlled by the week. Each time the clock says “class is over,” conversation stops, thinking shuts down and both too often are packed away until the next time the clock says class starts. During that hiatus, momentum is lost, trains of thought are derailed, and continuity rarely happens, as the ability to recall the brilliant point you wanted to make is gone for good. The next class just picks up where the lecture last stopped. And, at the end of each week, the clock has given students somewhere around three hours of learning.
Virtual learning, however, has 168 hours in the course of its week. Given the expectation is students will drop in and out throughout the week, add to her or his thinking as a new idea is offered up by the professor or a classmate, and mull things over during the course of a week or two (as nothing disappears), there is a deepening of thought and a stronger development of ideas. While most young people can immediately react with their feelings, one of the purposes of education is to help them move beyond using feelings as the basis for their decision making and positions to rely on evidence, logic, rational arguments, the interweaving of multiple sources, etc. This is much harder to do and takes time, time that demands more than 50, 90, or even 180 minutes of a week. But this shift can easily start to take hold when there are 168 hours with which to work.
