This post is a lightly edited version of a Twitter thread I wrote up earlier in a fit of pique over something I read in the New York Times. The author of the piece seems to think she has solved online education while managing to disparage faculty, ignore the realities of student body size and adjunctification at many institutions, overlook the temporary nature of the current situation, and spin out a very facile discussion about the cost and value of college instruction. Hence the pique. All the same, I think I managed to address some misconceptions that I know go beyond just the author of the piece, so I didn’t want my reaction to get lost in the ether of my Twitter feed. The original piece can be found by clicking here, and my walk-through is below:
“No one wants to pay $30,000 per semester for what they’ve been getting.”
“What they’ve been getting” was triage. Faculty had very little notice that we would be going online this semester (36 hours in my case).
“What they’ve been getting” is not what they will be getting in the fall because my colleagues and I are working dozens of hours above and beyond the work we normally do during the summer (and please note that most US college faculty are paid nine-month salaries, not twelve-month ones, but would never succeed in our professions if we didn’t work all year) to develop born-digital courses that will work. This extra work involves reading up on online education, taking webinars about how to use the technology available at our institution, participating in town halls on best practices for online education, making readings available digitally (sometimes with our camera phones because we can’t get into our offices to use scanners), and developing workarounds for the equity issues that crop up when our students have vastly different access to technology because of socioeconomic and geopolitical factors. And again, this is on top of the work we regularly do in the summer, when we are not paid: In my case, that’s writing an academic book, translating a popular book from Spanish, drawing up plans for the trade book I want to write, and finishing three articles.
In the spring we were working in emergency conditions; in the fall conditions will be sub-optimal (because what deadly pandemic isn’t?) but we will have planned for and adapted to them.
“A survey of college students in the spring found that about 75 percent were disappointed with the online learning experience during the lockdown.”
Trust me, your (children’s) professors were, too. That’s why we’re scrambling now.
“I’ve learned that my family gets the best bang for our buck when our daughter engages directly with her professors, her classmates and the material.”
The current situation is, for sure, emphasizing a number of existing philosophical questions about what college education is, what it’s for, what it costs, and what it’s worth.
This particular framing raises questions to my mind: Is this your daughter’s education or your family’s? Is it about education or about money? Is it an investment? If so, what kind? How are you measuring what to me sounds like a crassly commercial “bang for your buck”? If she majors in literature rather than chemistry, is that less of a return on your investment?
Conversely, what is your daughter doing to ensure she gets “bang for her buck”? Did she have online study groups with her classmates last spring? Did she take advantage of her professors’ extended online office hours? Did she make the most of modified assignments that let students. delve deeply into areas of their interest in place of or in addition to regular class sessions that were disrupted? What does she do during a regular semester?
“Can it be done? I think it can, and here’s a suggestion for how to do it: Schools could embrace an older style of teaching used by British universities — the tutorial system — and adapt it for the online world.”
This… is not a new idea, and there are lots of resources for how to do digital pedagogy well. Start (but don’t stop) here.
“The students are expected to work actively with the material as they engage critically with the instructor and one another.”
This is the crux of the matter, though: expectations and engagement. During a regular semester, I have some students who are super engaged and enthusiastic, who take my course because they are interested in the topic, and who go all in. I have some students who are there to fulfill a requirement and really don’t want to do more than the minimum. Most of my students fall somewhere in between: They’re interested in the course, they want to be there, but they also have a job that’s helping them pay tuition, and because I’m in a Spanish department and language and lit aren’t seen as giving good “bang for their buck” most of my students have a second major, most often in the sciences. And so when they get called in for an emergency shift at work or when they have their bio and chem midterms the same week, the work for my course may fall by the wayside. The attitude correlating money and learning evinced by this op-ed is precisely what make teaching, whether f2f or online, harder; students often engage more with their more “valuable” classes.
“Bang for buck” can become a vicious cycle as students do more work for their more “valuable” classes and less for their “less valuable” one and in turn get less out of those classes because students have to be active and equal partners in their education. They put less into their less commercially useful classes, get less out of them, and thereby reinforce for themselves and their families the idea that those classes are less than, even before remote instruction comes into play.
Have you ever tried leading a small-group discussion at the end of October when two of your fifteen students have done the reading? It sucks, whether it’s in person or online.
As the prof in that situation I alternate between posing questions, which feels more like pulling teeth, and on-the-spot mental gymnastics to try to recover the situation and present the material in a way I hadn’t planned for. Students end up feeling bored and guilty, and it’s a waste of time for them and for me.
“So, what’s the catch? I won’t sugarcoat it: Active, online learning means a lot more work for professors and other instructors.”
It’s more work for faculty, but it will also require more and more consistent work from students.
Remote instruction has the potential to be enriching or a huge flop. I’m doing the work to make it work because it’s my job. I take pride in a job well done and I don’t want the semester to be miserable or worthless for myself and for my students. Teaching well requires a baseline of time and energy that is too great not to do the extra to make it work under difficult circumstances. Even if I only look at it from a self-interested perspective, if I don’t do the extra work, then I’m wasting all the time and effort I devote regularly to my teaching. The fall is going to be different for sure, but we’re doing our damndest to make sure it’s not worth less, intellectually. But we’ll need, more than usual, for our students to meet us halfway and for parents not to backseat-drive from the sidelines (to mix a metaphor) and treat college as a commodity or a consumer experience.
My plan for the fall, when both of my classes (enrollments of 10 and 12 students, respectively) will be taught fully online, is to use the technology to kind of, well, force students to engage. What I’m doing is based on a what a colleague of mine did in the spring during two weeks of his course. He said it was so labor intensive that he couldn’t maintain it for the full half semester we were in a triage situation, but that it led to the. best. seminar meetings. he’s ever had at NYU. I’m hoping that with advanced notice, I’ll be able to put in the labor required to do things his way for the entire fall semester. So what did he do that worked so well?
First, he recorded a lecture. Students watched the lecture and answered some questions about it. Answering the questions “unlocked” their reading for the week. After they read, they again answered questions, which “unlocked” access to the synchronous discussion session that met once a week during one of the two regular meeting times. This way, there was synchronous contact, but also a lot of freedom for students in far-flung time zones or with new caregiving responsibilities at home. Not only did my colleague think that this led to great, engaged discussions, he said that a number of his students commented on it, too. So in a way, this plan leverages what technology can do to try to get students to come to class more prepared than they might on any given regular day.
What I don’t like about this, philosophically, is that by “unlocking” assignments and discussions with quizes, it highlights the fact that I can’t necessarily count on my students to come to class —f2f or online — prepared. I feel like I’m “hacking” or manipulating them this way. I also don’t know what will happen when midterm time rolls around, when covid-19 inevitably resurges, when life intervenes, and a student can’t do the reading, can’t answer the questions, and therefore can’t come to the discussion and even hang back and listen even if they’re not participating. Will they lose more that way than they will gain overall? I don’t know.
But I’m able to give this a try because I am in a secure, tenured job with a teaching load of two courses per semester and because all of my courses this year are small. If I were teaching a large lecture class, as I was last year, I don’t know that I’d be able to do more than imitate lecture format in digital media; and if I taught five or six classes at two or three or four universities as an adjunct, I certainly wouldn’t be able to do put in this level of extra work for no extra pay. There are structural issues that make small tutorials online prohibitive at many institutions of higher learning but there are still ways that the faculty there can make the most of technology, plan and prep, and help create a good, meaningful, rich experience for their students.
When we told our students this past spring that nobody anticipated the online learning situation, that nobody was happy about it, and that we were all in this together, it wasn’t just a platitude and it didn’t mean that we were just going to fold. It meant we were going to make every modification and accommodation possible, but that our students were going to have to meet us half way in a bad situation. At least that’s what it meant to me. An education isn’t just about what the student gets; it’s directly tied to what the student puts in.
“If she and her peers can get a quality education even under today’s difficult circumstances, that would be something worth paying for.”
She will, and you might have known that if you had asked some questions or done some research before announcing in the pages of the New York Times that you had just reinvented small classes for the digital age. And the people who are ensuring that she receives that quality education would really appreciate it if your starting position weren’t that it’s not worth it.
This is spot on, truly on every point. Brava!