LEARNING DURING THE PANDEMIC

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SCREEN

     Students all over the world have been dealing with the shift from in-person, normal classes, to remote and distanced forms of learning online for over a year now. College students especially, often referring to this education model as “Zoom university,” have collectively experienced a set of struggles that have risen from the ashes of normal schooling amidst the stress and chaos of the pandemic. However, while these student-based hurdles to remote learning have been vocalized and observed, we feel that there is another angle to view remote learning that can provide a more engaging and equitable experience for all those involved. The perspective of teachers throughout their journey with online classes is an important one, because it gives all parties insight on what the biggest hindrances are to this specific learning process. 

Our project’s focus has been to gather this insight, and use it to highlight the biggest challenges for professors during remote learning, as a way to reflect and improve upon them. In order to conduct this research at Arizona State University, we interviewed three professors, each from a different class structure, to address their biggest concerns.

One of the most prevalent issues in every Zoom classroom for professors has been witnessing the stressors from online classes bleed into the performance and work ethic of students, often against their own will. Instead of a matter of laziness, students have been experiencing fatigue and burnout on account of balancing the work from all of their classes in the same, monotonous setting of sitting in front of a computer screen at home. Professor Dawn Gilpin PhD, an associate professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, spoke to us about how this concept takes place within her own courses. 

“I just think everybody is really exhausted. But it's less about attention and more about exhaustion, I would say is the biggest problem. It's difficult as an instructor, as an educator, because you want students to get as much as they can out of the class,” says Gilpin.

“You've designed it in a certain way, there are goals and objectives that are important in the overall educational/career goals of the people who take it. On the other hand, you just see how everyone is kind of gasping for air, and you don't want to contribute more than necessary to the stress and fatigue that everyone is experiencing.” Dr. Gilpin explains her own take on how to address the issue in the most effective way. From a professor’s standpoint, it seems as though there has become a need to delicately weigh the options for assigning different types and amounts of work. This revolves around questions such as, ‘what will be most meaningful?’ and, ‘what will end up pushing students too far in this moment?’ Professor Gilpin also touched on how the difficulty levels of assignments started to vary because of the unique situation with the pandemic:

 “it just became really clear that it was much harder for everyone to process all of the material, even just get to doing all of the reading. Writing suffered as a result, because, again, they just did not have the brain space to dedicate to the work.” says Gilpin. Our discussion with her helped us realize a struggle that professors may face, which is that once the problem is identified on the classroom level, it becomes an issue trying to decipher the best way to go about it, as it is something so unprecedented. 

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In addition to navigating assignments and workload, another issue facing professors is making sure that students have access to all of the materials and resources to complete their work. We spoke to Cronkite professor Peter Madrid about some of his biggest concerns with remote learning, and he had some interesting points regarding accessibility to contacting sources in a journalism class. 

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“One of the hardest things that I’ve seen is that we've always had this great access to our sources, and all of a sudden you either have to watch something online, or interview like you are now on Zoom, or make a phone call,” says Madrid,  “you really can't go to their office unless there's real proper safety [precautions] in a place, but, still, the Cronkite School has placed restrictions on in-field reporting.” Madrid stresses how different the classes have become for his students in his writing and reporting classes, due to the pandemic. The shift away from in-person connections, whether that takes place in the classroom or in-field for the purposes of a story, has proven to be more difficult than expected. He also talked about how this very idea makes it that much harder to guide students in their work. 

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“I think the teaching style has changed a little bit, but not the actual change in curriculum,” he explains, “I really miss that one-on-one, you know, walking around the room, looking over someone's shoulder saying, ‘Hey, let me see your lede’...’good job’ or,  ‘you might want to try something different’.” Professor Madrid emphasizes that the in-person connection makes a difference in the way he interacts with his students, because he is able to help them while they work, as opposed to grading submissions and sending comments back and forth through email. Evidently, it is not just Cronkite professors who face this dilemma. 

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Teachers who run seminar and discussion based classes can speak on this issue especially, due to the nature of their classes’ format. For example, we spoke to Mathew Sandoval PhD, who teaches The Human Event at Arizona State University’s downtown campus. The Human Event is a course offered to honors students where they move between texts at a fast pace, and where the majority of their grade comes from the quality of their participation in discussions. The remote learning model is especially tough on classes like this, where students find themselves struggling to fit a word in. And where encouragement is needed from the professor, Sandoval expresses how it has become much more intensive in a Zoom-room setting.

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 “It's easier to pull off in person because I'm vibing off the energy of other people” says Sandoval, “The difficulty on my end is generating the energy necessary when I'm just basically talking to my computer”. It has also become a matter of how students consume and retain the information from their discussions. Sandoval discussed how the students manage to have very meaningful conversations during class, but that the system they are provided with to engage in class works against them at the same time. He explains how there are things that fall through the cracks that were never even predicted, because the Zoom structure is so new to everyone involved.

“We were figuring it out on our end, professors and administration, We didn’t think through all the potential pitfalls along the way that students might be privy to. We weren’t ready to address those.” The way that professors see their students behave in class also makes a difference in the effectiveness of the Zoom format, because it is nearly impossible not to get caught up in other things.

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 “Some students have started to treat it like media that they consume, as opposed to a learning environment that they participate in,” says Sandoval. “They have to be using it on their phone or laptop, where they have other programs and windows which are equally vying for their time. And because they are used to operating in a media atmosphere where they have multiple things popping at the same time, my class doesn’t have the privilege over those other things.” This analysis of the attention that students are giving to their classes, in comparison to all of the countless distractions they face, is something that Sandoval expresses his frustration with. It is a direct result of the fact that remote learning does not give students any other options to attend class, and this idea is one of the many complexities that come with remote learning.

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Professors sharing their unforeseen struggles to running classes like normal within a remote setting involves challenges that have not necessarily been addressed in the past. That is one of the biggest obstacles to overcoming them, because it is a structure that is so new to all fronts. With ASU planning to transition back to in-person classes for the 2021/2022 term, these professor perspectives give us a way to frame teaching methods moving forward, and value the interconnectedness that remote learning has resulted in.