Some politically incorrect thoughts about remote teaching

Perspective | Some politically incorrect thoughts about remote teaching

By Dan Drezner

Feb. 10, 2021 at 9:00 p.m. GMT+9

Next month will mark the one-year anniversary of the pandemic altering daily life in the United States — which means it will also be the one-year anniversary of university professors like myself teaching remotely via Zoom. What have we learned?

A year can produce a lot of data, and the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Beth McMurtrie has been diligently curating what other university faculty and students are saying. According to McMurtrie, “students are reporting that their academic workloads have increased” and yet “many faculty members say they’ve scaled back expectations.” This seems incongruous.

In a fascinating essay, Wake Forest University professor Betsy Barre offers six hypotheses for why this is. Maybe, as professors alter their assignment expectations, they are unintentionally assigning more work. Or maybe students are being forced to work harder than in the Before Time. Or maybe, just maybe, online instruction places unexpectedly greater demands on students who otherwise could have coasted through listening to a professor drone on and on and on.

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Every professor has a story to tell. Before I tell mine, let me stipulate for the record that I occupy a position of privilege and good fortune. Because I had previously recorded a lot of content for Fletcher’s online degree, it was easy to adapt it to be asynchronous content for Fletcher students. Furthermore, I have only been teaching graduate students. This is a far cry from someone trying to teach Introduction to English Literature at Ohio State, is what I’m saying.

That said, a year into this exercise, here is my primary takeaway from this experience: The reason for the cognitive dissonance between students and faculty is that online instruction, no matter how you slice it, is less efficient than in-person instruction. Both students and professors are working harder, and yet this greater effort does not quite yield the pedagogical benefits of being in the same classroom as students.

Readers might suspect me of being a Luddite on these matters, and they have evidentiary grounds for that suspicion. But I am not saying that online teaching is useless or a waste of time or anything remotely like that. Students who need to work full time but are highly motivated to earn a degree can profit from the online experience. On the technical side, Zoom and other platforms have handled this transition extremely well by my reckoning.

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Furthermore, as I have moved down the learning curve, I suspect my teaching has probably improved. Last year I found myself exhausted from Zoom instruction. This semester the synchronous sessions have been much less taxing; perhaps my brain has adjusted to this new online environment. My assignment instructions have grown more detailed and precise.

What has not changed, however, is that teaching online cannot completely replicate the in-person experience. For all the talk about the advantages of flipped classrooms, it does not compare with the interactive give-and-take that even an in-person lecture can offer, much less an in-person seminar. Any halfway-decent professor knows how to read the room mid-lecture and adjust. That is literally impossible to do with recorded lectures, and next to impossible to do synchronously on Zoom.

Virtual instruction also eliminates some of the more spontaneous and fruitful ways of engaging with students. I miss bumping into my students in the hallways and catching up. I miss talking with them after class as I leave the classroom. I miss seeing them at other talks and in-person functions. Attempts to replicate these elements online simply reveal the meager nature of the virtual substitute.

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Going forward, what I truly dread is the persistence of ongoing hybrid instruction — synchronous classes in which some students are in person and some are participating virtually. At least with remote teaching everyone is occupying the same-size box on a screen. I have yet to meet an instructor who has handled this mix well, and anyone who has been in a meeting with some people dialed in remotely knows why. The rhythms of real-time interactions in person are just different enough from online exchanges to throw both sets of students off their game.

None of this is anyone’s fault. My fellow faculty are trying harder than ever before to adapt material to a virtual format. My students seem intent on learning. We are just in a situation in which everyone is putting in more effort and no one is getting as much out of it as they want. That is what “inefficiency” means. This does not mean that online instruction should end — it just means we need to acknowledge the costs.